Peter Stathakos posted yesterday about Gmail, and I thought I'd continue the discussion about Windows Hotmail Live (or whatever it's now called). Since you get to it from the URL mail.live.com, I always think of it as "Windows Mail Live" so I can type the right URL. It's definitely been improving over the past few months, especially in terms of speed. And I think the bug in IE7 with multiple windows popping up has now been fixed. But compared with GMail I find it lacking. Here's the stuff ordered by importance that keeps me from using the web interface:
- Doesn't automatically show you new incoming email like GMail does.
- The spam filter often ditches legitimate messages, so it's not worth using the filter at all.
- Plagued with advertising. The main page has stupid irrelevant FOX-type news and sometimes ads with streaming video. I came for my email, not drivel.
- Doesn't automatically save drafts when you're composing mail
For these reasons I still use Outlook Express to pick up my Hotmail. And thus have to keep an XP machine around since you can't use OE on Vista.
I haven't had many outages on GMail, but I have heard (very rare) of some few folks that unexpectedly lost all their email. It may be a Firefox security issue not related to Google, but nonetheless it's always good to have a backup of the important stuff.