It’s time to say goodbye to Hotmail, because Microsoft has relaunched it as Outlook.com, adding lots of new tools and a fresh design based on Windows 8 Metro. You can register to try the preview version now, and all your contacts, old emails, folders and filters will be carried over.
Perhaps the best new featre is the 7 GB of Skydrive storage for email attachments, so you won’t need to worry again about sending large files. Also impressive is Microsoft’s promise not to scan email content or attachments for targeted advertising, unlike Gmail.
And Outlook.com automatically categorises emails as they arrive, separating, for example, personal emails from newsletters.
Microsoft wants Outlook.com to be more of a social hub as you browse, so it shows photos from friends and messages from Facebook and Twitter. More usually, soon you’ll be able to make Skype calls within it. You can still use Hotmail for the time being, though eventually you’ll have to switch.
However, existing Hotmail email names in Outlook.com have not been reversed, so you must register yours if you want to use the same name. This means if you had john@hotmail.com, you won’t be guarateed john@outlook.com without re-registering it.
To read more information, visit the Outlook blog. We’ll take a closer look at Outlook.com in the coming days.