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Microsoft Unveils Outlook.com, Hotmail's Successor
New submitter faraway writes "Microsoft has just unveiled Outlook.com, the planned successor to Hotmail.com. It includes a lot of what you'd expect from email today, including storage (images, data), a calendar, integration with other Microsoft tools, and of course a clean UI. According to ZDNet, 'Outlook.com is integrated with Windows and Office, and can pull in Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and LinkedIn contacts. The new mail client has the Metro look and feel. And it is providing users with more granular control over which ads they see and where they see them.'"
Great. I didn't have enough problem trying to explain the difference between Outlook and Outlook Express to people. Now I need to also include Outlook.com in the "Yes, they're from Microsoft and named the same, but no they're not the same" conversation.
To the person who will inevitably point out that OE is discontinued, it's still on enough workstations out there that I still receive "Why won't my OFT work in 'Outlook'" support calls.
One thing worth noting about this whole Outlook.com land grab: The accounts you are signing up for are not email accounts, they are "Microsoft accounts." They are keyed to Microsoft's whole package of cloudy services, so when you login to Outlook.com, you're also logging into SkyDrive, Messenger, and whatever else gets provisioned for you. If it worries you how Google seems to follow you all around the web once you're logged in, well, this is the start of Microsoft doing it.
Breakfast served all day!
Hello no IMAP/SMTP support goodbye
In the new UI, somebody decided that little tiny dark icons with no text description were cool.
Gear -> Settings -> Button Labels -> Text
You are required to pick a password of 16 characters or less - why? I blogged about maximum password length restrictions before, and I would like to hear a compelling reason why this is needed. Otherwise, I can only assume they are storing them in plaintext.