Though it comes as a surprise to a lot people that I use Hotmail, I personally don’t find it to be a bad service, but it isn’t good enough for me to tell people to give it a shot for a variety of reason. Gmail is a good service, it implements certain features quite beautifully which make using it a pleasant experience. But Hotmail isn’t far.
There quite a bit of little annoyances that bother me time to time,
1. Sent Reply:
If you send a reply to a certain mail, Hotmail doesn’t provide you with an easy access to that mail, you have to go to the Sent Mail folder & then find your mail. Google’s threaded mail is an excellent implementation. Hotmail doesn’t necessarily need to copy it, but can simply put a quick link within the Inbox that would enable us to jump to the reply we sent.
2. Received Replies:
Please get rid of the highly irritating & extremely annoying ‘>’ from the emails. These ‘>’ for every line just make reading the mail a horrible task.
I simply don’t understand what is the purpose of these, why were they ever present in the first place itself? How & when they appear. But they do & its ANNOYING!
3. Attachments:
Hotmail needs to take cue from Google here, Google has an extremely wonderful attachment displaying method by which be it documents or Excel sheets or PDFs or images are displayed.
I cannot say the same about Hotmail, recently my cousin sent me an email with a bunch of family photographs, Hotmail did not show the images inline & neither was there a link to download all the attachments together. I had to download all the attachments 1 by 1. Painful!
Hotmail also needs to figure out a way to open documents, its become a necessity now. I’m pretty sure its not that difficult, if Google can, you can too.
4. Make What You’ve Added Usable:
Hotmail wave 4 added a brilliant feature of inserting maps into the email from a sidebar. Genius. But unfortunately it has never been able to find any place that I have ever searched for. Beyond the search term ‘Mumbai’ nothing can be found.
The same wave also added Live Messenger into Hotmail it was withdrawn within a couple of days. No reason, no explanation.
5. Random:
It would be so much more easier if my Inbox would show new mails without me having refresh the page.
If 1 had the ability to embed a Skydrive folder into an email it would be so great. Be it a particular Photos folder or a single file, being able to embed the download link within the mail would be kick ass! The days when people attached long files has gone.
March 17th, 2009 at 5:34 am
Can’t believe someone I know actually uses Hotmail :-/
By the the “>” is a some-sorta-email-protocol, and yea It becomes *reaaally* useful when you have a gazillion mails going left and right (such as office correspondance)
March 17th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
how does “>” become useful? Its so far been a pain for me. You can’t forward that mail to posterous, you can’t forward to anyone else, simply ‘coz you know how ugly it looks to you & can only imagine what the other person will say.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:52 am
You forgot to add this one.. they really need to give full access of IMAP and POP3 to its users.. i think that POP3 is already allowed but IMAP would be a welcome edition. I think that they should also build some kind of a Windows Live Mail kinda client for other OS’s too..
March 20th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
@Manan sarcasm, dude
March 21st, 2009 at 3:12 am
Oh lol sorry! Thats what I was wondering. You gave a nice reply & I thought whats wrong with you
