Hotmail is dead! Long live Hotmail! Outlook.com switch now complete

03.05.2013, 7:37

Microsoft’s Hotmail client has been officially consigned to history, with the company today announcing the transition to Outlook.com has been completed.

In a post on the Outlook blog, the company said all Hotmail users have now been transfered over to the new service, all in the six weeks since Outlook.com came out of public preview in mid-February.

The company said it now has 400m active Outlook.com users, which is almost half way to its eventual goal of amassing one billion regularly used accounts, while building ‘the best email service in the world’.

The company has been very active as it moves towards the target, integrating Skype calls, launching a new Android experience, an Outlook.com calendar, and two-step security verification.

While Hotmail is now strictly past tense in Microsoft’s world, the company again moved to ensure users they’ll still be able to log in with their old email address.

Also, as part of its self-administered pat on the back, Microsoft also announced deeper SkyDrive integration and is now allowing users to attach files and photos directly from the compose email page.

The blog post explained: “Today, we’re excited to release the direct integration of SkyDrive into the Outlook.com compose experience. When you’re sending an email message, you can select files from your SkyDrive and we’ll automatically turn those into the right thumbnails with links that have the right permissions tied to people that receive the email.

“When you insert pictures from SkyDrive, you automatically get a beautiful photo mail. And it’s easy to edit the message, and add or remove files and pictures right from the new message compose experience. This new integration is starting to roll out today and will be available worldwide in the coming weeks.”

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Hotmail and Outlook.com are ‘having a problem accessing email’

13.03.2013, 12:42

Mcrosoft’s Hotmail and Outlook email services are having a bit of trouble with email at the moment, which is a pretty major issue for an email service.

The current status of both brands of webmail is that they are down, although Messenger, SkyDrive and other Microsoft web services are still going strong.

“We’re having a problem accessing email,” the company says on its status page.

“You might not be able to see all your email messages. We’re working to restore the service right now.”

The last updates were made some hours ago, with Microsoft adding that “Fixing the problem is taking longer than we hoped”. It aims to provide further updates by 13.12 GMT.

No word on what’s causing the problem yet, whether it’s a bug, a hack or something to do with Microsoft’s migration of Hotmail to Outlook. We’ll keep you posted.

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Outlook.com to swallow all Hotmail accounts by summertime

20.02.2013, 7:30

Outlook.com is ready for prime time as Microsoft pulls its email service out of the preview stage.

Microsoft is quite pleased with the service’s progress during the beta run, which has attracted more than 60 million users since the preview launched in the middle of last year.

While Outlook.com’s numbers are sure to grow even more now that it has moved past its preview build, Microsoft is going to speed up that process by automatically transitioning all Hotmail users to Outlook.

The move from Hotmail to Outlook sounds a bit smoother than Microsoft’s other upcoming mass account exodus in April though, when it will force Windows Live Messenger users to adopt Skype.

Microsoft claims the transition from Hotmail to Outlook.com will be seamless for users, as all of their inbox, folders, contact lists, email rules, and automatic replies will remain intact.

Users will even keep their existing Hotmail address and password, though they will need to access it through Outlook once the transition takes place.

A new Outlook address will also be provided as a subtle nudge to completely ditch Hotmail, but users will at least still be able to hold onto their old accounts. For now at least.

Microsoft said that it expects the forced upgrade from Hotmail to Outlook to take place sometime by this summer, though no actual dates are being discussed at this time.

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Exclusive: Microsoft: Hotmail perception is a big problem

29.03.2012, 10:05

Microsoft has admitted that it faces a major challenge in getting people to give Hotmail another go, despite the great strides taken in making the webmail service significantly better.

Speaking to TechRadar, Microsoft Group Product Manager for Windows in the UK, Ian Moulster believes that people’s perception of hotmail is based on the service as it was five years ago, and believes that the real trick is persuading people to give the service another try.

“The perception issue in itself causes people to not want to switch or not to even look,” said Moulster.

Moulster: “People think of Hotmail and think of the way it was five years ago with lots of spam, slow and clunky.”

“They are using Gmail or Yahoo mail and it seems to work – and they think of Hotmail and think of the way it was five years ago with lots of spam, slow and clunky.

Would I switch?

“They think it’s going to be hard to switch anyway so they ask ‘why would I switch?’.

“It’s an interesting problem to have. There are lots of cool things in Hotmail that people would look at and say ‘that’s pretty cool and it will make my life easier’.”

Moulster believes that Microsoft as a whole needs to be more vocal about the strides its online services like Hotmail and IE9 have come, as well as talk about the impressive Skydrive cloud storage that is becoming increasingly important to the company and yet remains largely unknown to the general public.

“We just don’t shout enough about the stuff that we have got,” Moulster added. “We don’t shout about many products at all – there’s very few we make a noise about.

“We’re primarily a software company and we have great products and the focus is on making those products as good as possible.

“We do need to tell people about the things we do and make sure people are aware of how good these products have become as well and I put IE9 in that bracket as well.

“I don’t think people realise how much better they are now; just how good those products are.”

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Microsoft: 2 million iOS 5 Hotmail connections

03.11.2011, 10:03

Microsoft has announced that more than two million people have connected their Hotmail account to iOS devices since the release of iOS 5, increasing at 100,000 a day.

The rapidly growing figure was revealed on the official Microsoft blog, as it talked about the ease of Exchange Active Sync on Apple devices.

“Hotmail is the world’s leading email service, and last year we added support for Exchange Active Sync, allowing customers around the world to sync their Hotmail inbox, calendar, and contacts to their mobile phones through the power of Exchange,” blogged Microsoft’s Chris Jones.

Easier

“Although we’ve had this support for a year already, with the release of iOS 5 it is now even easier to set up Hotmail on your iPhone or iPad,” he added

“Since the release of iOS 5, more than 2 million customers have connected Hotmail to iPhones or iPads, and we’re just getting started—almost 100,000 new iOS 5 devices are being set up with Hotmail every day.”

Jones is also hoping the new Android client will prove as successful and, of course, there is the spectre of Windows 8, which along with Windows Phone 7 will be aiming to grab back some of the mobile device market.

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Hotmail forbids ‘easy’ passwords

18.07.2011, 9:17

Hotmail has banned new users from using obvious and common passwords like ’123456′ and ‘password’.

The free Microsoft webmail service has also outlawed over-used phrases like ‘ilovecats’ from being used as the only thing standing between the bad guys and your emails.

According to Ars Technica, Microsoft is also considering extending the ban to existing Hotmail accounts too.

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p>Security conscious

Microsoft is also rolling out a feature that allows Hotmail users to report if another Hotmail user has been hacked.

Dubbed ‘My friend’s been hacked!’ the tool will then block the infected account and ‘your friend’ will have to go through the account recovery process to get back into it.

It’s clearly a good move for Microsoft to put more effort into making users secure their accounts – it only looks bad for the company if Hotmail accounts are regularly being compromised.

We hope Sony is taking notes.

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