Hotmail is making a cheeky move to tout the progress that their service has made in recent months. To show off what they think is a very strong product offering, they are letting anyone use any email address inside of Hotmail.
Dick Craddock from Microsoft put it like this:
Today we begin rolling out a feature that makes it easy to use Hotmail with any existing email address. Just as you can use Microsoft Outlook with an address from any service, you can now do the same with Hotmail on the web.
To try it out, you just need to register and validate your email address… Hotmail will guide you through connecting to your old service and importing your existing email using POP, and then you can begin sending and receiving mail from Hotmail with your existing address.
This will be rolling out over the next few days, so there is a solid chance that your Windows Live Hotmail account will not be ready for linking to your normal email address (mine was not, making screenshots a non-possibility).
What features does Hotmail have that you might want to switch over to start using? According to the Microsoft blog post announcing the trial system they are especially proud of the ability of Hotmail to send “up to 10GB of photos in one message.” I have to assume that that means what it sounds like.
Go to your live account and give this a try if you can. Heck, I haven’t used Hotmail in years, maybe it’s time to give it another try.
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