The best webmail services

Windows Live Hotmail Beta

Getting on the Live Mail Beta is a bit of a palava, mostly because the sign up process doesn't really tell you how to go about it. Sure, you can go to ideas.live.com and click on the Live Mail Beta, heck, you can even use that to get a Live ID. But that's not going to get you in.

Nope, to use this service you're gonna have to get a Hotmail address, if you don't have one already. Once you're in Hotmail, you can opt to use the Windows Live Mail beta from your Today page. But it's not that simple, either. Once you're in there, you have to further select that you want the high bandwidth, spangly version of the software, not the crappy HTML-ified version. Once you've done that, you'll finally have the priviledge of checking out Hotmail's latest incarnation.

Amazingly, the site works perfectly in FireFox - and it's a good job too, since even those who have traditionally avoided MS web products could be tempted back by Live mail. It's got a fantastic interface that looks very similar to Outlook, with the preview pane on the right of the screen. However, you can relocate the pane down to the bottom, and you can even change the colour of the interface if it pleases you. Yes, amazing as it may seem, Live Mail really is one of the slickest looking webmail clients out there.

Which comes at a price. Operation is pretty slow, and you can often be left waiting to open mail. We can only hope that more work on the code will yield faster performance, but given the reputation Hotmail has, we wouldn't bank on it. There's only one ad at the top, which immediately gives it the edge of Yahoo, and you get 1GB of mail out of the box.

Hotmail has a reputation for being a total spam trap, and it's something Microsoft is very keen to address. We're actually very impressed with the measures the MS has taken to keep spam at bay. Every message that comes in that isn't from a person in your address book has a little yellow strip at the top, inviting you to Report & Block the sender or Allow future messages. This makes it very easy to whitelist those you want to see pootled straight through to your inbox. If anything, the junk filter is a little overly aggressive, but you can tune it in the options settings.

Unlike Gmail, there's no way to flag messages, although you can add folders and set up filters, which can get sophisticated enough to be really useful. There's no tagging either, and no way to pull in mail from an external POP 3 account. There's no auto responder, another crucial omission. Whilst it may look slick, it's a little light on the features, it seems.

That said, contact list integration is fantastic, and there are various pre-set filters to allow you to pull in all your Outlook, Outlook Express or even Gmail contacts, meaning you should have to spend the minimum of time moving to the new system. Calendar integration is not as good as Google's, but better than Yahoo's. Oddly, there's no integration with Windows Live Messenger, which we think would be a good step forward. However, there's good integration with Live Mobile, which will ping your mobile when you get a new email message.

Perhaps the biggest downer is that, like Yahoo, it's hard to be credible with a Hotmail email address, these days. Can't Microsoft give us a new, slightly more hip email service based on this software

Whilst the new Windows Live Mail beta certainly looks like a fantastic client, and works well with spam and contacts, it's ultimately a little lacking in features at this stage for us to wholeheartedly recommend it.

Uppers: Good-looking interface, spam management, contacts.
Downers: Light on features, Have to have a Hotmail address.