Microsoft has finally moved all Hotmail users across to Outlook, completing a migration to the revamped webmail that launched last summer.
All users heading to hotmail.com are now automatically redirected to Outlook, and Microsoft sent out an email explaining the changes and providing a guide to the new interface.
According to the company, it has moved 300m accounts across in the last six weeks, part of a process that has not been without glitches, with Hotmail and Outlook falling over at times.
The company admitted the migration was a significant challenge. “It meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes – equalling more than 150 million gigabytes of data – and making sure that every person’s mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade,” said Dick Craddock, program manager for Outlook.com in a post on the Microsoft blog.
“Of course, this had to be done with a live site experience that was handling billions of transactions a day.”
Although Hotmail addresses and mobile access settings will still work within Outlook.com, the migration brings down the curtain on a service that was launched back in 1996 and was many people’s first experience of email.
The company said it was also adding new features to the Outlook.com service, including SMTP send, which Microsoft said would make it easier to send mail from different email addresses, and deeper integration with SkyDrive cloud storage.
Google’s Gmail updates
Google has also been making changes to Gmail, by introducing a tool for stripping dates and times out of emails for inclusion in its Calendar.
“If you do a lot of scheduling over email, it’s now a little bit easier to create events directly from your Gmail,” said Boris Khvostichenko, Gmail’s product manager in the announcement. “Starting today, dates and times within emails are lightly underlined: click them to schedule that conference call or lunch date without leaving Gmail.”
The new feature is set to appear over the next week, with any additions to your schedule also including a link back to the original email.
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