Hotmail Gets A New Outlook - Comments Page 2

Hotmail initially was the junkmail account I gave to businesses, but it ended up being my primary account a few years ago. While I also have gmail accounts, I had been extremely leary of jumping on the Google+ candywagon. In short, I am concerned that it is not healthy to have one private company who in possession of maybe 90+ percent of one's online data & electronic footprint. Emails, facebook, photos, online purchases, online searches, integrated medical records, banking transactions, credit card purchases... It feels a bit creepy, and dangerous.

At this point we trust all parties. But facebook has taken highly-contested actions when profit margins faltered. Same with many other businesses. What might happen three years out with all my personal data when Google, or Microsoft, etc. sculpts a new agreement under one of their companies/services in order to remain competitive and increase profits? How might my data be mined JUST WITHIN companies my host owns or controls? It makes me very squeamish. I'd like to see a dialogue about this.

@Debbie
To get back to hotmail, click on the gear icon next to your name on the top right. It will give an option to switch. Good Luck !!

I might be considered old fashion, but I still prefer and use AOL for my Email because I find it most intuitive to use. No problems.

Bob
I like your write up. I also have gmail that I use on occasion, but will give this new Outlook a try, you made it sound so good.
But, have had AOL for 20-years or so and am quite use to it, it would be nice if Outlook turns out to have a better system. Will let you know what I think.
Thanks

Love the new Outlook.com. Plan to use it to read and respond to e-mails in my various Gmail accounts. One-stop shopping.

Thanks for the great article; am using info from it tonight to give an Outlook.com presentation to my computer club members. Giving credit, of course, and encouraging my members to sign up to receive your very informative newsletter.

Features that would get me to switch:

(1) Powerful spam-fighting tool. It would be like SpamCop on steroids, with several rounds of analysis that would target ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and help and protect ALL of the spammers' victims.

(2) Clock features. There are so many possibilities that this would need to be strongly user configurable, but I can give some examples. A clock giving a easy visual image of how long ago the email was sent. A clock showing the correspondents time zone. A clock that you could use to schedule the email for future delivery, especially in cases of email that is going to a phone and you don't want to risk waking them in the middle of their night or business mail that should not be delivered until office hours.

By the way, the MAIN reason I'd consider using a Microsoft product is because I think they have become less evil over the years and they have actually done some good against the spammers upstream--and Feature (1) is targeted against the spammers downstream. The main reason I'm trying to use the google LESS is because they are rapidly becoming more and more evil. Did you know that the google has become the leading lobbyist among tech companies? I've read several reports to that effect.

It is good that "Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage service is tied into Outlook.com." Is there a similar link for Gmail and Google Drive? If it does exist, how can one use it?

I had yahoo---hotmail---gmail---I detest all the ads and have run privacyfix several times---then I one day in a search found an email that is no ads!
I went to it, and I am still with it--several mos. later!