Microsoft forcing me from hotmail into outlook

Mary_Hartnell

It is probably more than 15 years ago that I got my hotmail address.
Someone told me about the concept we now call "in the cloud" though he called it "thin client" computing.
It made perfect sense to me to keep all my correspondence out there in the web somewhere; available all over the world, where ever I could beg borrow or steal access to the internet. Rather than join my friends, using my particularly slow BT "party line" and find outlook express downloading masses of spammy rubbish onto my PC.

I now have three hotmail addresses, one gmail and a rocket mail (yahoo) address, each used for specific functions in my life. The busiest is a sacrificial hotmail one that I give to web sites, which insist on having an email address before allowing you to use them - surprise surprise they then spam that email address like mad.

Anyway to come to the point: What is Microsoft trying to do?
I specifically went to web mail to get away from running mail applications on my own PC and laptop.
What is the hidden agenda ?
Obviously I don't want to lose my prime mover advantage and lose my widely disseminated main email identity. So can I continue to keep everything "in the cloud"?

Tropez

Outlook.com will still be a webmail service and so it will not be mandatory that you use the Outlook or Outlook Express desktop client.

As for the "hidden agenda", Microsoft is simply attempting to beat Google's Gmail product by rebranding Hotmail, which from a PR PoV is not a favoured brand these days, to the more professional "Outlook" name whilst adding more smart features and social networking related features in order to attract people away from Gmail.

Whether it works or not remains to be seen but Microsoft is banking on the free Office web apps and dominance of Office and Outlook in the workplace, as well as the popularity of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Skype and the like to win them customers from Google as Outlook.com will interact with all of these to some degree if a user desires.

chewynut

It might be worth looking at the link to the FAQ. it was in the e-mail they would've sent you a month or two ago.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/outlook/auto-upgrade-outlook-faq

As Tropez has said, you don't have to download MSN - or now Skye, to use it. You don't have to change your e-mail from @hotmail to @outlook. The most basic change is that you now go to outlook.com.

Hotmail needed a revamp. It was ugly, old and so sluggish on my computer. Outlook also looks ugly but at least it doesn't take five minutes to do something.

Mary_Hartnell

I am now using the wonderful improvement of "Outlook".

HOWEVER, it is probably my settings, but the old Hotmail had evolved to my way of working.

Basically it was more or less WYSIWYG (What you see us what you get).
Now is seems to be back to the email of 20 years ago.
It is possible to paste something into my email that looks OK (perhaps copied from Gmail or Yahoo) It looks reasonably OK but after I have mailed it most of the formatting has been stripped out and the carriage-return-line-feed is all over the place.

Please don't recommend using Gmail or Yahoo. I already do and find it very convenient to keep my projects on Gmail, my business on Yahoo and my personal-social life and spam on two Hotmail accounts.

Mary

PS I got an email to my Hotmail account from a friend working in a Chartered Accountants office; Outlook flagged it as failing "the fraud check", It was a simple reply to my email not some massive joke chain letter. Apparently I was not the first recipient to discover this response.

I am using Firefox as my browser, and I have noticed that my hotmail.com address is now spell checking in American English: Is the spell checking now being done by Microsoft rather than Firefox?

aliasojo

chewynut wrote: »

Hotmail needed a revamp. It was ugly, old and so sluggish on my computer. Outlook also looks ugly but at least it doesn't take five minutes to do something.

You obviously haven't seen the complaints from shed loads of people who say it now does take ages to do something.

Personally I'm seriously hacked off at the 'we can't connect to outlook at the moment' messages, the continuous rolling dots that suggest it's trying to load but really it does nothing and the lag that's involved almost every time I try to see my email.

And this is on several computers running Vista, Win 7 32bit and Win 7 64 bit.

I loathe it.

AlecEiffel

I personally love it Outlook.com! Pleasant and clean interface, quick and easy to use. Much less cluttered than most other webmails and got a good address.

Also, it is 'just' email, contacts, calendar etc (well plus chat) which is something that has been annoying me about my Gmail, they keep adding more Google features that automatically log you on if you are logged into Gmail. I hate being in Gmail and quickly looking at a YouTube vid and finding I'm logged into it.

PZH

aliasojo wrote: »

You obviously haven't seen the complaints from shed loads of people who say it now does take ages to do something.

Personally I'm seriously hacked off at the 'we can't connect to outlook at the moment' messages, the continuous rolling dots that suggest it's trying to load but really it does nothing and the lag that's involved almost every time I try to see my email.

And this is on several computers running Vista, Win 7 32bit and Win 7 64 bit.

I loathe it.

I'm with you on this one.

They had the nerve to ask me for feedback - so I gave it to them with both barrels (not that they'll be bothered or even do anything about it) :rotfl:

aliasojo

phoodless wrote: »

They had the nerve to ask me for feedback - so I gave it to them with both barrels (not that they'll be bothered or even do anything about it) :rotfl:

As did I. From several email accounts.

Mary_Hartnell

Mary_Hartnell wrote: »

I am now using the wonderful improvement of "Outlook".

HOWEVER, it is probably my settings, but the old Hotmail had evolved to my way of working.

Basically it was more or less WYSIWYG (What you see us what you get).
Now is seems to be back to the email of 20 years ago.
It is possible to paste something into my email that looks OK (perhaps copied from Gmail or Yahoo) It looks reasonably OK but after I have mailed it most of the formatting has been stripped out and the carriage-return-line-feed is all over the place.

Please don't recommend using Gmail or Yahoo. I already do and find it very convenient to keep my projects on Gmail, my business on Yahoo and my personal-social life and spam on two Hotmail accounts.

Mary

PS I got an email to my Hotmail account from a friend working in a Chartered Accountants office; Outlook flagged it as failing "the fraud check", It was a simple reply to my email not some massive joke chain letter. Apparently I was not the first recipient to discover this response.

I am using Firefox as my browser, and I have noticed that my hotmail.com address is now spell checking in American English: Is the spell checking now being done by Microsoft rather than Firefox?

We all enjoy a good winge, but I have currently received a long email in "rocketmail" that I would like to send on to two of my social contacts, but I don't want to confuse the situation by revealing my "business" address to them, nor do I want Outlook to strip all the nice formatting someone went to some trouble to structure the information - it will be more or less unreadable after Outlook has turned it into "boiler-plate". :mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

Does anyone know how to (re-) set up reasonable HTML formatting in Outlook/Hotmail.

usignuolo

I really really liked Outlook Express which Microsoft decided could not be used with Win7. I have tried various alternatives none really satisfactory and now use gmail. But I don't like it much, I don't like that you cannot drag and drop emails direct into folders and in particular that you have to move sent items into the in box before you can save them.... And the new gmail redesign, which is coming downstream and seems to be designed with teenage morons on their mobiles in mind, looks even worse. :mad:

Jivesinger

Mary_Hartnell wrote: »

I am using Firefox as my browser, and I have noticed that my hotmail.com address is now spell checking in American English: Is the spell checking now being done by Microsoft rather than Firefox?

It might be that Firefox doesn't have the UK English spellchecker installed (or lost it on upgrade).

Is it just Outlook? What happens when you reply to messages on this very forum for instance? Does it spellcheck in US English or UK English.

(Right-clicking in a multi-line text box like the post editor on here will show which Languages are installed in Firefox, if any)

To check the language in the Outlook.com website, from your Inbox, click on the cog-wheel thing at the top-right of the page and select "More Email Settings". In the Options screen which comes up, on the right-hand side (under Customizing Outlook) there should be an option called "Language"; try this and see which language is selected.