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'Wave 3' of Windows Live Hotmail will offer IM

By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

August 27, 2008, 12:46 PM

Microsoft has begun promoting the "Wave 3" Windows Live Hotmail update that promises a UI and functionality upgrade that will make the web-based mail client more like Outlook.

The UI upgrade, according to Microsoft, will be a combination of Hotmail's Classic and Full versions, listing the mailboxes' content to the left of a central "reading pane." In addition, Microsoft is promising more "cool stuff," which includes an increased amount of storage, and integration with other Live services like Calendar and Messenger.

The addition of all these features bring Hotmail even closer to Outlook in functionality. Microsoft's signature e-mail and communication software has already been offering in-window IM, along with calendaring in its "to do bar".

These changes are a part of Microsoft's Live suite evolution, which has been broken into "waves." Last year, Live Wave 2 established Redmond's presence in the cloud by offering desktop software for services such as Live Hotmail, Messenger, Search, and Photo Gallery; and introducing services such as Skydrive.

Wave 3 has begun the integration of many of its existing services with each other, and will culminate in the rollout of services like Groups, FrameIt, and Windows Live Movie Maker.

[M.E.'s NOTE: News of these developments first appeared yesterday on LiveSide.net, a blog and news service for Windows Live developers. However, the information that appears in this story was fully sourced through Microsoft.]

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By MikeTechno

posted Aug 28, 2008 - 5:04 PM

The single biggest feature that Microsoft can add to Hotmail or Windows Live Mail is the ability to easily archive old e-mails off onto CD-ROM or DATA DVD for long term storage. Many people have thousands of old e-mails that they want to keep a permanent record of that is easy to access and read locally on their PC's. They don't need or want all of their old e-mails stored on Microsoft's mail servers on-line. (I have been e-mailing Microsoft asking them to integrate this feature for over three years now by the way, with no response or comment what so ever)

Microsoft should make it very easy for users to burn discs of all their old e-mails that they want to keep a copy of for long term, off-line storage. Those discs should then easily be able to be accessed and viewed on any computer with a simple mail reader tool installed on it (A micro version of Windows Live Mail that would just be used for viewing old, archived e-mails from disc. How hard would that be to create?)

Why is this off-line storage idea such a difficult concept for MS to grasp? I would think this would be the #1 most highly valued feature if MS were to finally integrate this ability into this app.

And, I stress here, this should be a MINDLESSLY simple process with as few steps as possible. It doesn't need to be complex. The fewer the steps the better here. I am sure that if MS wanted to, their coders could integreat this feature into Windows Live Mail and Hotmail in about three to four hours tops, if that, if they chose to do it.

Score: 0

By Meth

posted Aug 28, 2008 - 11:57 AM

PLEASE tell me that Hotmail is finally going to allow you to oraganize your folders into subfolders. I have probably dozens of them and it would be really nice to be able to for example make a Friends folder and then put a subfolder for each of my friends in that instead of having them all in one huge list.

Score: 0

By DudeBoyz

posted Aug 28, 2008 - 6:31 AM

Don't like it.

I use OE 6 with OE-QuoteFix and read and send all my mail in plain text.

I'm not much into online email stuff. I've been able to access my Hotmail accounts through OE 6 for a long, long time and I would prefer to continue that way instead of dealing with a web-based approach.

I've tried the Live Mail application and found it to be slow, buggy and even quirky. Not ready for prime time. So, OE6 will do for me.