Outlook.com Preview – Microsoft’s Heavyweight Gmail Contender

As an IT professional, I have always been untrusting of desktop email clients and their ability to eat your data. There have been many improvements, but I have functionally had cloud based email for the past twelve years. I like the idea of having a single unified email source that I could access from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. True enough that there are features lacking in popular webmail such as searching within attachments and that you can still access old messages when you are not able to connect to the internet. These benefits vary based on usage, but Microsoft has not been asleep at the wheel and has introduced Outlook.com.

At first glance, Outlook.com webmail feels like Gmail when navigating around and while it is still in beta, there are already tons of features built in; you can create vacation auto replies, email forwarding to other accounts, and fully customizable folders to help organize messages. It has a pleasant user interface that is probably a preview of what we can expect from Windows 8 as well as familiar calendar and contacts. Contacts can be web imported from a variety of sources including pre-existing Gmail accounts and Facebook account friends list.

Outlook.com email accounts will also be connected to a 7GB Microsoft Sky Drive that allows users to keep and send large attachments as well as edit Microsoft Office items without needing to download them. There is even an option to “opt out” of saving personal usage information. My only complaint so far for Outlook.com was the right side bar advertisements which do not appear to be removable.  There are also some compatibility issues with some web browsers and the email fraud detection looks a bit buggy. These issues are likely to be fixed before official release. If this is where Windows Live webmail is heading, it is finally some good news for our San Diego clients.