I’ve just seen this great comment from Zack on my Hotmail Closure (Part 1) article. I thought it was worth posting about.

Zack writes:

aswell many of these chain letters state that there are only 578 names left. Consider this:

Your email address can be anywhere from 1-64 characters in length.
in your email address, you can have anything from a-z,
0-9, preiods(.), hyphens(-) and underscores (_) thats a total of 38 possibilities for EVERY 64 characters in your email address.
that means that there are 64^38 (2 760 698 530 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000) possible email addresses.

now for the funny part:

the worlds population is only 6 602 244 175 (as of july, 2007)
that would mean in order for there to be ONLY 578 names left…. every single person on this planet would need to have:
4 181 454 786 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 email addresses….

I think Zack’s analysis only covers email address of 64 chracters. Since you can have email addresses of anywhere between 1 and 64 characters there are even more possibilities. But the point is very well made. Hotmail is not running out of email addresses.

If you want to take the “upgrade” to Live Mail beta from Hotmail then you can do it right away. All you need to do is look for the link shown below in the sidebar of your hotmail account.

Give a click and you will get a page with a lot of information about the new service. I would advise that you check out my alternative review of the service (part 1, part 2) which suggests it is less of an upgrade than the Live Mail team do. Anyway next you need to click on the sign up link at the top right side of the screen.

Then agree to this agreement:

And that is it.

I think you will find when you click the link on this page you will instantly have you Live Mail account. See what you think, I am not a big fan - but you may like it. You may find the following instructions useful.

Degrading from Live Mail Beta

Login to your Live Mail account. And click Options in the top right.

Then look in the left hand pane for “Switch to MSN Hotmail”.

Now read this message from the team begging you to stick with the service. And ignore it - press “Switch Back”.

And that’s it.

Today I wrote a final plea to Hotmail Support. Here it goes:

Dear Christopher A., Christian M., Christian N., Anne Marie O., Christina S., Vendrelli R., Jimmy B., Janet B., Leo and Mark Anthony F.,

I write to you 201 days since my initial request. Yes two hundred and one days. That is 6 months and 17 days. Interestingly all 10 of the representatives that have written back have indicated that the suggestion I made was a good one and would be included in an upcoming release. Unfortunately however somewhere along the line you misbranded adding a help article as a some sort of product upgrade, rather than the simple task of writing a few words it is.

Never have I had a response from any representative that wasn’t highly canned. The template is very clear by now and the deviations from it are often embarrassingly slight. No one seems to be capable of actually doing anything at your end. Yes you can write back, but can you get anything done? No. Of course not.

So in the 201 days that have passed what have you done towards the article? Lets summarise your progress. All 10 of you have done… precisely nothing. You said that time restrictions made it difficult to write. So I wrote the article for you. Why didn’t that speed things up? Why isn’t my article on your site now?

Why is the paper pushing in your office such a significant part of your job that it is now all that you do? Why has one of the world’s largest companies got the most useless support team?

I am doing everything I can to publicise my experiences with your team. And of course I am still desperately pushing to get the article published on your site. The high profile ex-Microsoft employee Robert Scoble commented on the issue with “If I were on the Hotmail team I’d just put up an article that simply linked to this guy’s post”.

You’ve lied to me. You’ve ignored my requests. You’ve done precisely nothing to help the situation. And still I bet you’ll come back with an automated email. Listen. I don’t want your automated rubbish. Delete the template. Don’t bother to email back if it means you can get the article done quicker. Just “The article is up” would be very good.

I ask again and again to have the contact details of your manager. And of course I don’t get them. But I’ll ask again. What is the email address of your immediate manager?

As always my article is online and copyright free for you to use at http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail and every email between me and your team is published at http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail/story .

Remember when you reply, your response will join that record.

Sam Davyson.

If you are not familiar with this campaign: I am trying to get a Hotmail help article that states Hotmail do not send forwards as a means to tell their customers that accounts are closing. Seemingly simple. But apparently not. Read all the emails, or just a summary.

If you think your Hotmail account is closing, because of a forward you received. The good news is it is not. Please don’t forward the message to anyone.

I happened to be on the output point of Windows Live blogs at msreadr.com today, and I caught wind of an update to the Live Mail feature set that was live/going live at the time. Code named M7 I think. One of the features really caught my eye, it said that they were adding checkboxes. Now this isn’t an odd feature for a mail application what I thought was odd was that I hadn’t noticed they were missing when I first reviewed the product. But when I thought more about the interface that they have adopted it made more sense of course they hadn’t had checkboxes in their setup the messages are treated like much more square rectangles than anywhere else I have seen, and you are encouraged to drag them around rather than (I suppose) using checkboxes to select messages for movement. So I was sort of interested in how their checkbox implementation was going to work.

Luckily I have a Live Mail account that has a pretty constant stream of 6 or 7 spam messages every day flowing into it. So I have a place to play with the product, and mail to play with. I have to say it is a long time since I have seen anything as awkward as the way these checkboxes work. The first thing is that they are not always visible. They have them appearing in the place of the envelope which indicates whether a message has been opened or not when you hover over a message. So you hover over a message, the envelope vanishes and is replaced with a white square. Only on the message you are hovered over note, not the whole column. If you click at this point the box gets itself a green tick and when you move the mouse off the message it doesn’t regain it’s envelope icon. Instead the tick remains and it takes on a blue shaded background.

Here is the list of emails	Hover over the first email. Colour/Icon change.
Click the checkbox. Get a green tick.	Miss the checkbox. Lose your first tick.

Ok that doesn’t sound perfect, but it sounds reasonable in the circumstances. What is so hilarious? Well lets take a look at what happens if you miss the checkbox. It looks like you’re in luck, the message is still selected and gets it’s green tick like any other would. But the surprise is that any messages you have previously ticked on your way down the list marking the spam are automatically unticked. I have done some tests, and I havent been able to tick more than six messages in a row without missing one and losing the lot. This also means that when you have selected a message for reading just by clicking on it, the checkbox automatically gets ticked. Well this is no real problem, who cares if the box is ticked or not. Ok. Try this for a scenario. You check your inbox see you have an email from a friend and also four messages that are clearly spam. You click to read the message from your friend. Then you tick the boxes on each of the four spam emails and drag them to the trash can. Now you better hope that you notice that it says five items as you drag them over as your message from the friend will of course also be selected still. Oh heavens…

As an aside: the images above are real screenshots of the best view of the inbox you can get in Live Mail. Anyone else think it is just too limited? The information provided is cluttered with that terrible text overlap when someone’s name is too long. Compared to the snippets you can get in Gmail with the interface looking nice, it seems pathetic.

Just in case you thought that it was. It is not. I have this on pretty good authority. And if it does close in the near future I am happy for you to quote these words back to me in a complaint email. Erm one second who is this news too? Who thinks that Hotmail is closing? An unfortunately large number of hotmail users I am afraid. They express this thought of theirs by forwarding emails that will “save their accounts” if they are sent to enough people. These forwards are very much a reality and although I am not part of the Hotmail network I often receive them from friends who seem unelightened on the issue.

I wrote back each time and wanted to send a link to a Hotmail help article that would state clearly that Hotmail is:

a) Not closing any time soon.

b) Hotmail would never contact its users by forwards.

Unfortunately I could find neither in their index. And so I wrote to their support team asking for them to either link me to the article or perhaps them to add such an article. And I entered into a long and continuing discussion via email about this issue. I initally wrote on March 4th 2006. Fourth months have passed since then. I have sent them twelve emails, and got responses to most of them. Most of them are canned responses that repeat the previous one with absolutely no regard for any points raised in the email. I decided to write them an article myself which I published online and I continue to host. I also have a full archive of emails between myself on them online for everyone to see. I would urge you to write to Hotmail if you have ever received a forwarded email like the one I describe and you would like them to stop. If you do you may want to quote my case directly and point out your annoyance at their lack of action. The ID is SRX1010202287ID. The email address that I am using is support_x_EN_SY@css.one.microsoft.com which you can email or you could take out a fresh support ticket. Thank you for your support, lets stop this irritation.

This post is the second in a two part series. The first gave examples of types of emails that can be received about Hotmail closing. It is important that you note all of these are completely bogus. You can see them here.

The first article is now number 1 on Google for [hotmail closure] so awareness is spreading even though the article I would like is still not in place.

I am not a Hotmail user but with lots of friends that are I realised that many people are unaware that letters that claim Hotmail is about to close are totally fake. I found that there was no article in Hotmail’s help facility to indicate this so I wrote to them to get this fixed.

I sent this email on March 4th 2006:

I am currently not a Hotmail User. However I am friends with many people that are and subsequently I get a lot of messages from Hotmail users. I notice than some of these messages are forwards and take roughly the following format:

* Warning! You will have to pay for your hotmail account on 1st October unless you forward this message to 18 of your MSN Passport contacts in the next 24 hours.

People believe this. And they forward it. I wanted to convince a friend of mine that it is not the case that Hotmail would ever need to send messages around via forwards, and that if Hotmail ever needed to contact anyone they could do it easily as they have everyones email addresses. These emails after all often have hundreds of email addresses on and if they fell into a spammers hands could cause problems.

So I searched your help files and couldn’t find a clear statement on the subject. I am therefore requesting that you add an entry to your help about these emails and stress that they are *a* not real and *b* not to be forwarded. It may even be worth adding a link to the hotmail main page to the article like some banks have about fraudalent email circulation.

I for one would like to see this issue resolved. I have saved a copy of this message and I expect a full response from you in the near future.

Many thanks,

Sam Davyson.

And I was pleased to pick up a response just two days later, that included:

Sam, I understand the convenience if this request can be granted and this is why I am going to submit this to our Hotmail Product Development Team as a feature request for future site improvement and upgrade.

Excellent! I am not exactly sure how it is a “feature request” but all the same it is a response that says that they will do something about it. I wrote back:

I am very pleased to see that you have submitted my request for further review and that it could be added to the system in the future. I am not particularly pleased with the nature of the processing that you detail, as to me when only 1 extra article is being requested to be added to the help section this process should be efficient and take an extremely short period of time. However I am very pleased to see that it is under consideration.

If you could let me know when the help article is question goes live, or when it is rejected as a proposal I would be very grateful.

And on March 7th I got another email:

I have checked with our Hotmail Product Development Team and Christopher already submitted this item for review. I would like to impart that Hotmail Product Development Team might consider this item for future releases.

Please continue sending your feedback or suggestions by clicking on the “Feedback” link located at the lower right part of your Hotmail account.

This is from a different technical helper by the way, and he has missed the fact that I don’t use Hotmail. And has also failed to tell me that I will be emailed when it goes live. So I pressed the point:

Yes, there is one more thing. I would like to be notified when the help article goes live on your website or when you review and reject the proposal. This would be very useful to me as it would save me having to make special visits to continually check the Hotmail Help topics, as Hotmail is not a service that I myself use. You will find an explanation of why I am therefore contacting you in the first email that I sent.

And they agreed:

Yes, we will gladly inform you when your proposal will be added to the Help topic links.

A few days passed. I got another forward. I wrote back to the team to ask why they hadn’t managed to get it up yet. 15 days had gone since my original request. The fourth different Hotmail correspondent wrote back:

Please keep the following rules in mind when receiving and responding to mail that seems to come from Hotmail:

- Hotmail does not forward messages to you (example: “From” line contains “FW”).
- Hotmail never sends you chain letters.

Finally! This was the quote that I was looking for, and it was the sort of text that I wanted them to put on a page for everyone to see. You shouldn’t have to email in 4 times to see this. I asked to speak to someone more senior to start getting things done, since we were coming up to a month since I first emailed.

I ask this time that you refer me to the member of staff immediately your senior. After dealing with three seperate Hotmail representatives with no visible effect, now I would like some action.

They insisted they were working on it:

Sam, we may not be able to commit in providing you an exact date when this article will be added in the Help topic links, I would like you to know that our team are working round the clock to have this article to be added in an acceptable time frame.

Working round the clock! I thought I’d do them a favour and write the article for them. That would say them time. So I did, and I put it at http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail and emailed them to tell them.

I understand that production of an article may take time. But the length of time so far taken that is from the 4th March until the present day (almost 1 month) is quite unacceptable in my view. It might be a busy time for you though so I thought I would try to help you out a little.

I have therefore written, formatted, and published (and am now hosting) and article which explains that Hotmail do not send emails by forwards. Obviously I don’t expect you to use it on your site (certainly not in its current state) but it might give you some ideas into how to make your page to explain it.

The address is…

I got a terribly automated response. With no recognition even of my article. But it did say at the top that they normally answer emails within 24 hours, which I found amusing. Since of the six emails I had got from them only 2 had been within this time frame. I wrote an angry response, and got nothing back for over a week. So I wrote again.

If you provide me with an email address I also have lots of feedback about my experience with the customer service team. I would love for you to learn from what I have had to deal with and not make the same errors again. As I say if you pass me an address I will willing send you some information.

No response either. So on the 25th of April I wrote again:

I will be in touch again, from now on I will be writing weekly on a Tuesday evening whether I have a response from you or not. In the case that you do reply I will write back earlier. I remind you that I am keeping a record of all my messages to you and all of your responses.

And nothing again, so 2 months after my initial request I wrote:

I realise that my situation is not improving. I am now writing my tenth email to you. The last three of them have received no response at all. I am not willing to explain the points again if there is no indication that my emails are even being read.

On the 5th of May I got a message including this:

As for your propose article, I will submit this item to our development team as a feature request. We regularly review customer comments and feature requests and use them to plan new Hotmail improvements.

What? This is what I had been told happen 2 months ago! I was not happy. This time I will quote my message in full, since it serves as a nice summary of my dealing with the team.

Jimmy B,

Thank you very much for replying to my message. I can only wonder what happened to my three other messages to you since you last wrote but that is not too much of a problem — at least now you have been back in touch. The fact that this is about 30 times later than your apparent target of a 24 hour turn around which Vendrelli R claimed you “normally” reach (Email Mar 30th) is an irritation of course but I think it is probably more important for you to think about this information and use it to improve your customer service.

In terms of what you said in your message back to me which I have waited for over a month to receive I am totally dissatisfied. Here is why. You start by saying that you have read over the previous emails with the representatives — this is good to hear. However at the end of the email you thank me for using Hotmail and say that I am a valuable customer. I do not use Hotmail. Let me repeat: I do not use Hotmail. If you had read the previous discussion then you would have seen that I stated this particular point four times before on March 4th, 19th, 30th and April 25th. If you have inadvertently lost any emails I will gladly send you copies or you can read them in the quoted text that follows this email.

Ok. That is perhaps a minor quibble that highlights that you didn’t read the contents of my messages with the care that your message might suggest. You then go on to say this:

MSN has been very aggressive and proactive in protecting our more than 170 million users from spam and hoax e-mail. We prevent more than 2 billion messages a day from reaching the inboxes of our users. We protect our users on many levels, from the server to the client.

What is this an advertisement? Why on earth are you telling me how many customers you have? Why would I care how many messages arecaught each day by your systems? What is the relevance of any of this to me? Perhaps if I was a Hotmail user I might find this in some way reassuring, but even then I think I would feel that it was perhaps a little too irrelevant to the matter in hand. Maybe you have this paragraph in your template for responding to requests to your customer service team.

The next paragraph is really what irritated me about the customer service though. It reads:

AS for your propose article, I will submit this item to our development team as a feature request. We regularly review customer comments and feature requests and use them to plan new Hotmail improvements.

Christopher said on March 6th:

Sam, I understand the convenience if this request can be granted and this is why I am going to submit this to our Hotmail Product Development Team as a feature request for future site improvement and upgrade.

And the Christain M said in the next email on March 7th:

I have checked with our Hotmail Product Development Team and Christopher already submitted this item for review. I would like to impart that Hotmail Product Development Team might consider this item for future releases.

Christina said:

This is Christina and I have read your e-mail exchange with the previous support representatives about your proposed article will be added in the Help topic links.

Although the sentence here doesn’t actually make any sense I think it suggests that the article will be added to the help section (that is certainly the implication of its context).

And now, over 2 months since my first email, you decide to tell me that you are going to submit my suggestion to Hotmail product development as a feature request. It has already been submitted. Has it been deleted from your system? Did you get round to reviewing it and decide that it was not worth your whilse in implementing it?

If it has fallen out of your system for this reason then I wonder why I have not been informed. I agreed with Christian N on March 8th that I was to be informed of when a decision was reached. He said:

Yes, we will gladly inform you when your proposal will be added to the Help topic links.

So I am left very confused. What is going on in your support team? Christina tells me you are working around the clock to address issues. I have asked repeatedly to be passed on to a more senior member of staff. This request has never been commented on. I have created the help article for you (and published it) to save you time but this has never been commented on either.

This is now my eleventh email. I am not going to stop. To repeat: I am not going to stop. I think a lot can be gained from my experiences with your customer support team and I recommend that you take some time to review the entire affair. I am not at all satisified at this time.

Please pass this email to someone more senior who will be able to write a message outside the customer support templates. I remind you that I am keeping records of every message that I send and receive relating to this episode.

Yours,

Sam Davyson.

Again a request for someone more senior. And I got back a “subject matter expert”, although I am not sure if they just changed the footer of their message. Anyway the text was much better than the normal messages that I had been getting:

I understand that you are totally not satisfied with what is happening.

Sam we would like you to know that we have taken note of your comment, suggestion and efforts on educating Hotmail users, through the article you published, regarding the hoax messages that are roaming around the Internet.

I apologize but we still cannot give you a definite date when the article be published. We are still in the process of reviewing every comments and suggestions we are getting from customers.

So this is now May 7th. I didn’t write back immediately, and I havent yet since I thought I would give them some room to work with it. In the mean time I published the entire full messages between myself and them online at http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail/story. There is not much in their extra from what you see in the quotes I have used in this article, but it is just there for reference. I will not give in with this, and I will get back to writing to them shortly. I invite you to also write in to help. Just send this email to Hotmail Support:

Hello,

I am writing because I am concerned about the lack of interest you have given to the point that Sam Davyson has been making on a repeated basis. You have still yet to deliver the requested article.

I therefore worry about my privacy by using the email service that you provide.

I would grateful therefore if you could give me an update on the situation.

Yours,

[ ]

P.S. If you are unfamiliar with the case then please look up case ID SRX1010202287ID or visit http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail/story where you can read about it in full.

I am using the email address: support_x_EN_SY@css.one.microsoft.com, but filling out a form on their site does the same. Let me know in the comments if you do this, and I will be glad to quote any responses on the story page and in later blog posts. Eventually, with enough people doing this, we should get what is needed. Why it takes over 11 emails from me is another question, and one that Hotmail need to ask themselves I think.

In late June I will be updating the Hotmail page, and making it into much more of a campaign, and try to get as many people as possible to email in to tell Hotmail to get their act together on this.

This is part 1 in which I describe the various types of Hotmail Closure notices. In part 2 I explain how I acted to try to bring a help article to Hotmail’s help directory to say that “Hotmail is not closing, and they do not forward emails by chain mail”. Read that here.

I am not a Hotmail user. I used to be, but I don’t intend to return in the near future. Even the facelift due shortly doesn’t give it anything on Gmail in my opinion. However I know a lot of Hotmail users. And I therefore get a lot of messages from Hotmail.com. Sometimes the content of the messages suggests that Hotmail is running out of resources and will have to close in the near future. The messages go on to say that they need you to forward the message to 20 contacts or so to keep your account active. The messages come in various forms. Some are pretty convincing like: (View Large)

And others are purely embarassing:

Hey it is Andy and john the directors of MSN, sorry for the
interruption
but
msn is closing down. this is because too many inconsiderate
people are
taking up all the name (eg making up lots of different accounts
for
just one
person), we only have 578 names left. If you would like to close
your
account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. If you would like to keep
your
account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT
LIST. This
is no
joke, we will be shutting down the servers. Send it on, thanks.
WHO EVER DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSEAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE
CLOSED AND
YOU
WILL COST £10.00 A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR
CONTACT
LIST.
NOW YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS or REPLAY.
COPY THE
WHOLE EMAIL. GO BACK TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. AND PASTE
THANK
YOU FOR
YOUR ATTENTION

Some cite a BBC article from a few years ago at this address:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1189119.stm

All of them request for you to get forwarding the message along to save yourself your acocunt and/or money for your account. These messages are not new at all. And all of them are completely bogus. There is to be no closing of Hotmail in the near future, or even the distant future. And even if Hotmail did decide that it was going to start charging users (which I have to say is fairly unimaginable with the current competition) then they would contact everyone individually. Hotmail do not and will not send you important service changing information via forwards. I havent checked but I am pretty sure they would break the terms of the EULA if they didn’t.

I started to get a little sick of these messages. Especially since I don’t even use the service. For some reason people kept believing them and kept forwarding the message on. Not only that but as you see at BreakTheChain.org these messages are pretty dangerous. Everytime you forward the email the addresses contained within the email pile up. I have some messages in my inbox with hundreds of email addresses on from steps further up the chain. If I were a spammer then I would be a happy person. I wanted to send out a message to everyone who sent me a forward of this nature (and everyone they were sending it to) that clearly stated the above and linked to a article on the Hotmail help where this information is clearly shown. Only one problem. This information is not clearly shown on Hotmail’s help. It isn’t shown at all. I guess at this point I began to sympathise a little with the “forwarders”. They had no one telling them that these things were completely false. Apart from intuition, how were they supposed to know?

On 4th March 2006 I wrote to Hotmail customer support. I know I am not a customer but it was the most suitable link I could find on their website. I requested a new article on the subject described above. Since then I have been exchanging emails with their support people. All of these emails will be published on this blog as soon as I have got to the bottom of the issue, that will be part 2. So far I have sent five messages and got 4 replies. The ball is in their court at this moment, but I expect a further reply very soon. I have written to four different representatives (always someone else replies) and as of 20.36 GMT on Tuesday 21st March there is no help article up.

I have written before about the Webmail Wars. If you have followed the story so far you’ll know that like a lot of people I am an ex-Hotmail user, and now that I use Gmail for all my emails. Back in September when there was a lot of buzz about the new services to compete with Gmail I asked:

Perhaps the more interesting question is: What will Gmail do? And possibly most importantly when?

And I’d say that with the release of Gmail Chat, we sort of have an answer. Gmail are going to continue to improve the service that they offer. Put simply Gmail Chat is a web based IM system built on AJAX technology (i.e. built to be smooth) and integrated with the Jabber Network, and of course the Google Talk client. It means that if I want to email someone who is at that time checking their Gmail account or is connected to the Jabber Network then we can talk via instant messenger. There is no download required. And it only offers very limited functionality when compared with a desktop client, or quite a bit of functionality when compared with any other current web based messenger.

To accomodate it into the Gmail interface was obviously a tricky task. But I think that it has been done quite well. They added a “Quick Contacts” box down the side of every screen which acts as your control panel for chatting. You can choose whether people appear in this box using controls in the main Contacts list. And depending on their privacy settings you may need to “Invite them to Chat” before you can get talking. When invited you get a little box within your Quick Contacts box to ask you whether you want who ever has invited you to be able to seen when you are online. You can set some privacy defaults in the Chat tab of the Settings screen. You can see in this screenshot that you can change your status to something custom, you can appear busy, or you can sign out of Chat altogether even if you want to keep checking you emails.

There is also an option to view Gmail without chat, which I think is an important thing to consider, this feature does run the risk of feeling gimmicky and not for everyone. So what is the chat actually like itself? Well firstly big points for the Gmail team by not making the interface (by default anyway) a load of pop ups. Instead the chat window becomes anchored to the bottom of the browser window. This means that it displays over your Inbox, Trash, Spam (or whatever you are looking at). This helps to give a real desktop feel, and the windows are collapsable to the base of the window. They initially appear blue but they flash bright orange as an alert when someone sends you a message (and you don’t have your cursor in the reply box). This sending of a message also triggers their name to flash orange in Quick Contacts. Again a desktop feel. The chat windows line up from right to left. And I have managed to get a maximum at any one time of four. I am not sure if more is possible, it is hard enough to get four people online ready to chat! (Continued)

Want to get Live Mail for yourself now? Just read these instructions.

This continues from Part 1. Which I published earlier, and can be read here.

So the screen that you get when you log in with Firefox is something like below. It tells you that the mail beta has not been built fully for the browser that you are using. And that you should maybe use another browser (IE) for the moment.

[ View this screenshot in large. ]

I suppose that I have to admit this is fair enough. This service is not yet on general release. And credit to the Mail Beta team: you can read your mail in Firefox. You just have to use a slightly degraded interface to do so. Basically you lose the new parts of the interface, and what you are left with is much like the current version of Hotmail, with a slightly whiter stylesheet. For instance you lose the preview pane, and you lose the drag drop features.

So now I go to IE. And I login. The login page is probably temporary. But it sets the style for the service to follow. It is cleaner than what you see at the moment. And it is completely white. The first page that greets you when you sign in is the Today tab. This is shown on the screenshot below. I really thought that this would go in the new version. In the past it was always in the irritating jump page with Hotmail. It simply delayed your access to your inbox. And Hotmail used it to display particularly large adverts. They would argue that the function of the Today tab was to give you a dynamic view of your mail. Just the mail that is important to you. At a glance. But it never really worked.

[ View this screeshot in large. ]

They seemed to have departed from this a bit. And the Today tab no longer lists any of the mail that I have got at all. Instead it tells me about the new features in Windows Live Mail Beta. At the moment the new thing seems to be deleting mail. Which seems particularly funny to me after just recently when Gmail equipped themselves with a delete button. Anyway, you can see that the Mail Beta team have been kind enough to allow us to see how many messages we have got from the Today tab, even if we can’t actually see what they are. (Continued)

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I signed up to try the Beta test of the next generation of Hotmail, dubbed as Kahuna and officially called Windows Live Mail. I had heard good things about it. This release is the first major upgrade to Hotmail is years and is in direct response to the release of Gmail by Google (although it is nearly two years behind). Yahoo also recently starting beta testing their new mail client which is supposed to be absolutely awesome. I look forward to checking that service out as soon as I’m invited.

So I log on to the new version and I immediately notice the white background. Most of the page is white. I don’t like that much. Also I notice that it defaults to this “today” page straight away which was present in the previous version of Hotmail, and is just a jump page before you get to see your mail and a place Hotmail have used for big adverts in the past. I would have thought that in a redesign the first thing to drop would be the today page. But apparently not (luckily it is removable through a user script). Next thing I see is it’s telling me I’m using the wrong browser. Internet Explorer is need to experience all the features. Ok, it is only in beta I’ll try it in IE…

(…to be continued but I can give you the bottom line now: I’m not going to lose the art of conversation just because Hotmail’s got a new white background.)

Read the full story, and see Part 2 now.