Hotmail rises from the dead as Microsoft unveils new email service Outlook

Hotmail is dead. Now, don't give me the looks. I know it's been dead for years. But now it is well and truly dead, thanks to its new avatar - Outlook.com.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the preview of Outlook.com, its new email platform. Though it was my first mail id, I haven't been using Hotmail since Gmail started sending out invites in late 2004. But after logging on to the new Outlook, I am having second thoughts about retaining Gmail as my primary mail account. Not because it is some out of the box mail solution, but because it is clean - the reason why I shifted to Gmail in the first place. After about eight years of service my Gmail is a cluttered mess with scores of unwanted and thousands of unread mails.

Outlook, as I said, is the best clean-up act for email since Google's mail service . It is also an email for the new digital world, where people have multiple devices and multiple social networks to manage. To start with, the interface is so clean you will feel Gmail is some gully in Mumbai. It is certainly a spillover of the design principles of Windows 8 .

It is not yet there, but Outlook already has Facebook and YouTube integration. Flickr and Twitter will soon be there. So you will see all your updates on the main page itself - no need to open these sites separately. And Microsoft has a strong logic behind this: 20 per cent of all mails these days are updates from social networks.

The clean up act does not stop there. Since about 50 per cent of all mail is in the form of newsletters and promotions, it automatically sorts them into newsletter, social media updates and so on. Click on one and you have the option of deleting all mails from the sender, even scheduling a delete every time you get a mail from the address. Now that is good news.

And it gets better. For now you have apps to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and One Note within the mail. There is a catch though. Outlook does not work to its full potential if you are using an old browser.

You will also be able to open a specific mail and initiate a Skype chat with the sender, as the webchat service, which Micrsoft bought some time back, will be fully integrated into the mail. There is also the MSN messenger, if you still use it.

Existing Hotmail, live users will be able to login to Outlook.com with their old id and password. You then have the option of switching over to an Outlook.com mail id. All you old and new mail will come to this id, though you might have trouble with devices where you have logged in with the old address.

As I mull over whether to do a complete shift back to Microsoft mail, I see my inbox and realise that it hasn't seen a serious mail in a couple of years. Maybe it is time for me to revive my oldest mailbox.