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Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

blogs.office.com

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Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#171

Post by daveasaurus »

yaix wrote: post #51

Nice UI, very light and simple, seems to be running fast even on my netbook. I guess I will start to use my 15 year old hotmail account again, good to finally have an alternative to Gmail. Only one thing: Microsoft, I know its really chiq and en-vogue nowadays to have some element with position:fixed; on every page, but please: don't! There is no reason whatsoever why I would want to see all the time the titlebar. I…

I use both gmail and hotmail (or outlook.com now) and the titlebar in this case is the same as in gmail: it has the user-name of the person logged in, the "options" (gear icon), the send/reply/delete/new-email buttons. And actually with gmail the interface has the google logo and search input above the title-bar taking up an extra ~100 pixels.

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#172

Post by [deleted] »

masonhensley wrote: post #58
saurik wrote: post #29

Microsoft really doesn't care about branding: once I logged in to my new @outlook.com Inbox using Outlook.com, I was redirected to live.com where I had a single message pre-sent to me from the "Hotmail Team" welcoming me to Microsoft Live Hotmail.

Outlook's url seems to be on the live.com domain... confusing at best. Let's make a comparison of url's from the "home" view: New Outlook (wtf): https://bay002.mail.live.com/default.aspx Gmail (better, could be cleaner): https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox

[deleted]

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#174

Post by yajoe »

If you are curious, this is a reskin of hotmail.com. It's still a separate codebase from the Exchange-backed OWA. Check out the preview of Office 365 and compare it to this experience, and you'll notice that the two are subtly different.

This is very interesting to see them converge the brands.

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#175

Post by kmfrk »

epistasis wrote: post #153
dlikhten wrote: post #71

"Your password can't be longer than 16 characters." Well, it failed my test. Sorry. I never trust my emails to small hard to remember passwords. I rather trust them to very large easy to remember/type passwords. Like horses-functional-pickles Also their capcha, I cannot figure out it, i won't spend more than 2 minutes on capcha

This threw me off as well. I thought Microsoft was supposed to be security conscious, but putting in small, arbitrary limits in places where they don't belong is not reassuring in the least. They also make it insanely difficult to use a password manager, as the login page URL redirects from outlook.com to some randomness that's 205 characters long.

I can sympathize with it being a preview and all, but the consequence will nevertheless be that there will be a bunch of people out the who will enter I mean, unless Microsoft explicitly prompt them with a reminder of sorts, when they flip the switch on a sane password length, but what are the odds of that happening?

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#178

Post by StacyC »

beagledude wrote: post #67
gecko wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give a counterpoint, I not only know maybe a half dozen people who voluntarily use Outlook; I know at least two who voluntarily use Outlook on a Mac . I think the fact that few developers enjoy using Outlook is causing you to overgeneralize. Most people who don't care about things like whether their email is in mbox format, or who don't want to learn how to use Mutt or notmuch, find Outlook surprisingly easy to us…

Outlook on the Mac is actually a very decent client, and I prefer it over the other options.

I use Outlook 2011 on my Mac for the company Exchange email, contacts + calendaring. It's not bad at all, and Spotlight searching is very fast.

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#179

Post by conductr »

I love how they give a history of webmail progress but totally understate what Gmail did for webmail and why it is so widely liked. Gmail did more than give a bigger inbox. It changed the game for web interfaces, especially webmail. Looks like Outlook is just imitating the Gmail look & feel.

Re: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

#180

Post by ncri »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #86
esharef wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of disagree. The UI is clean but things aren't where you expect them to be and it makes it confusing. For instance, I didn't know where to put the subject when I was sending my first email -- it's huge but it's weirdly placed and unintuitive. I also couldn't find the Send button at first because it's on the Nav bar -- not where I expected. I also agree with the post below re: branding. I went to "Help" to see…

I agree 'send' could be better placed but the subject line is pretty obvious and placed where I would expect it. The 'to' field seems badly placed to me.

The subject line is in a good position, but it doesn't look like an input field si I overlooked it first... Similarly, the content area doesn't look like a text area - slightly confusing.
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