Microsoft Live Mail
I don’t check my Hotmail very often anymore (since switching to Gmail quite a while ago), but I did today just to clear the alerts I keep getting from MSN Messenger (where most of my IM contacts are). I noticed a fairly garish and green button inviting me to check out Live Mail Beta and decided to have a look.
Gmail killer?
Obviously Live Mail is an attempt to catch up with Gmail, which has been wildly popular since arriving two years ago and shaking up the webmail world with its spiffy AJAX-driven interface and huge two gigabytes of space.
The process of moving from normal Hotmail to the new Live Mail is very cumbersome. It initially comprises of several screens for setting user preferences.
The sent mail option is quite absurd. Gmail saves everything - why wouldn’t you want to keep sent messages? Not autosaving sent messages is a horrible feature of the 2mb-per-user webmail days that should have been forgotten long ago. And you only get 30 days!
The colour-scheme option is nice, and thus far Gmail can’t compete - but its a very trivial feature (note: I couldn’t help but pick the worst possible colour scheme, as I did with Google Page Maker).
More AJAXery
The name ‘Live Mail’ alludes to a slick AJAX-driven interface, and Live Mail does deliver on this functionality, even down to a very familiar loading alert — a very atypical swirly loading animation (which looks uncannily similar to the Firefox loading icon).
One nice feature of Live Mail is automatic spell checking, complete with Office-style zig-zag red underlining. Right-clicking on a word presents alternative spelling suggestions as you’d expect.
The ‘To’ field has an excellent contacts list feature. It’s a fairly simple feature that lets you select names from your contacts next to the ‘To’ field. Such functionality, albeit very basic, is surprisingly missing from Gmail. You can also email to a group of contacts as they appear in MSN Messenger, another handy feature.
Cramped layout
While there are some good features in Live Mail, the layout is still quite cramped — very frame-driven, much like the desktop Outlook. There is a lot of wasted space around the banners, which could be tightened up. Unfortunately Microsoft are still sticking with the graphical banner ad, even though Google’s targeted text ads are far less imposing, far less garish and far more relevent to users. And they are still pulling in big bucks.
By moving the search box down and spreading the username and logout options out, Live Mail could save a lot of space.
Conversations?
One disappointment with Live Mail is that there is currently no option to sort mail by conversations (even Outlook 2003 has that feature). For me, this has become by far the most efficient way to organise my email — not only is there the obvious and logical grouping of the same messages, but Gmail also combines all messages into one parent ‘message’, which saves an awful lot of screen space.
But I think the biggest disappointment with Live Mail is that it’s ‘enhanced’ mode is built exclusively for Internet Explorer 6.
It’s 2006, and I can’t believe Microsoft have built this purely for IE6. It’s just sheer laziness. As a developer I spent more time developing for IE6 than any other current browser. But, again, this is only a beta product — hopefully Microsoft will clean up their lax browser support in the future. However, I’m really not tempted in the slightest to switch back to Microsoft for my webmail, as Gmail is still streets ahead.