Some of you out there who use Hotmail might have seen this today:

(click image for full size)

The reason I say some is because this is a gradual roll-out of the updated Windows Live Hotmail service. If you use this e-mail, you will see this upgrade possibly today, tomorrow, next week, etc. But it will eventually happen.

The bad sense of humor comes from the ² at the bottom of the above splash page, which states:

We’ve designed Windows Live Hotmail storage to grow with you, but at a reasonable pace. That means you should have plenty of storage unless you suddenly want to store the planet Jupiter on Hotmail, in which case we’ll send you a nice e-mail asking you to please not try to store planets on Windows Live Hotmail (although gradual storage of moons and asteroids is ok).

"..gradual storage of moons and asteroids"?

Um.. yeah. Thanks, Microsoft.

Anyway, the new interface is notably better. All of it can be seen in this screen shot:

(click image for full size)

Here’s what has changed:

1. Easier management of recipients

Each recipient in To, Cc or Bcc is now surrounded by a border with a small X so it’s easy to add/remove people from a mail. Very nice.

2. Ability to change from Rich Text/HTML/Plain Text at whim.

I am VERY happy this is now here, particularly with the plain text option. In addition, plain text now looks like plain text with the use of a monospaced font.

3. Less icons

Icons were removed to speed up the interface. I don’t like this because they were nice to have.

4. Arrows removed from Junk/Deleted, "Empty" link now present

There used to be a small "swish" arrow next to Junk and Deleted to empty those folders but those are gone now. Instead, when you click on those folders there’s an "Empty" button above the e-mail list. I’m not sure if I like this or not.

5. Ability to set priority on e-mail when composing

The red exclamation point icon means "high", the blue down arrow means "low".

And we’ve still got no way to filter by priority when searching/listing mail.

You can set it and send it, but can’t filter/sort by it.

Ugh.

6. Ability to select themes

This is a crappy feature because there are less color options. I use the Silver theme in the old Hotmail. In the new Hotmail you’ve got 8 crappy theme choices. No customization whatsoever other than what MS gives you.

Bleah.

~ ~ ~

This is about all I could spot for the time being unless there were other things I missed.

Overall, yes – it is faster and better. Even though the themes suck, the plain text option with monospaced font more than makes up for it because that’s a function I’ve been wanting in Hotmail for a really long time.

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