Hotmail Gets a Makeover

Hotmail?! Ugh.  A virtual storage space equivalent to your garbage can: spam, spam and more spam. That’s what you’re thinking, right? Who, besides your grandmother, uses that old, orange, ugly monster of an email server anymore?

But maybe, just maybe, you should consider revisiting your good old Hotmail account soon, because it is finally changing. Within weeks Hotmail will be rolling out a set of shiny new features. The changes are long overdue but it seems Microsoft has finally decided it will attempt to give Gmail a run for its money.

What’s New in Hotmail:

One significant improvement of the new system is the inclusion of categories, much like in Gmail.

Hotmail users can now label messages or senders into a particular group, either automatically based on content or sender, or manually. Users can also ‘flag’ messages, which automatically moves them to the top of your inbox and marks them with a little flag, much like Gmail’s ‘star’ system. Hotmail will also now automatically recognize newsletters and put them into a separate folder.

What’s Different from Gmail:

One totally unique and very welcome feature of the new Hotmail is the ‘scheduled cleanup.’ Scheduled Cleanups allow you to move or trash messages from specific senders after a set time period. You want all those irritating Facebook notification emails to be automatically trashed every three days? No problem. You want your banking statements to magically appear in their own folder at the end of every week? Done. It might not sound very exciting but the scheduled cleanup is actually a refreshing and much needed tool that allows you to easily keep your inbox neat and tidy.