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Microsoft’s Hotmail Update: Social Media & SPAM-Centric

Microsoft recently unveiled a new look & feel to Hotmail including additional features focused on eliminating inbox clutter and social media. Here are a few key takeaways:

Hotmail Highlights:
This is a dashboard breaking down emails from your contacts, social networking sites, flagged emails and any upcoming events you’ve marked. They’re more or less built-in filters from the get-go. Nicely done.

Filters:
There are also filter tabs that sort out all of your inbox messages based on the criteria of the filter. On-the-fly sorting.

Categories / Quick Views:
Photos, Shipping Info, Documents. The most common emails sent to you will be sorted out automatically based on their contents.

Sweep:
Most importantly, Microsoft has implemented a “Sweep” feature that allows users to remove clutter from their main inbox. For email marketers, this means that your campaigns may suffer with Hotmail users.

Trusted Senders:
You can boil this down to being Microsoft’s equivalent to Goodmail. They pre-approve specific senders and IP addresses for users to ensure delivery, complete with a safety logo next to the subject line.

Their SPAM handling techniques are quite interesting, too. They’ve developed a way of sorting out legit email that you may have signed up for unintentionally (which they dub “graymail”) and actual SPAM, which they’re calling “SmartScreen”.

Most of the updates on the surface seem to be “too little too late” to covert a Gmail user, for instance. But the advances of the new Hotmail user experience as a whole makes the argument that email is further planting itself as the hub for all social communication online. Unfortunately, I don’t think these fundamental changes to Hotmail will go over well with their users, since they skew older and spend less time online. But nonetheless, it’s progress. It’s one step forward and not two steps back (*ehem* Outlook 2007, *ehem*).

There are more features listed on their preview page including Office and cloud storage implementation. It’s a definitive step in the right direction for Microsoft & Hotmail and I’m curious to see what they release next.

So what do you think this means for email marketing? If these features are widely adopted by Hotmail users will email campaigns of the future just be “swept” away, overlooked to never be opened again? I think it’s a definite possibility and one that deserves discussion. Comment below if you have any thoughts.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 17, 2010

Outlook 2010 - The Inevitable Letdown

Apparently the fixoutlook.org campaign was “too little, too late”. When the campaign hit it’s stride and Microsoft took notice, they had unfortunately already begun developing the next version of Outlook: Outlook 2010. And with the development of their new email client comes the same glaring issue all email marketers find so abhorrent: using the Word engine to display their emails.

Dave Grenier from CampaignMonitor has been pivotal in putting this on Microsoft’s radar in the first place. He’s had direct correspondence with Microsoft’s development team for some time now and reported the following from them:

“At this point, our plans for email authoring and rendering in Outlook 2010 are unchanged. However, I can tell you that this is a significant topic of discussion as we plan our business going forward, and something we will definitely be thinking about for future releases of Outlook.“

The highly-regarded testing service, Litmus, had access to test the Beta version of Outlook 2010 and have posted their results here. Needless to say, they’re not surprising and are more or less in-line with what we’ve come to expect from Outlook.

So hopefully by 2013, Microsoft will release another email client—this time using a significantly better rendering engine thus allowing for elements such as background images to render correctly… Emphasis on “hopefully”.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Mar. 30, 2010

YOU FIX

The Email Standards Project by way of Campaign Monitor is pleading with the developers at Microsoft. Microsoft are insisting on keeping the Word HTML rendering engine (most recently used with Outlook 2007) in place for their next release of a predictably disappointing and bloated email client, Outlook 2010.

For anyone who has designed and coded an email in the past three years knows how big a pain in the butt Outlook 2007 is to work with.  There has been an outcry from day one about it’s drawbacks, as it has done nothing to push the flexibility and growth of email forward.  It’s done quite the opposite, I’m afraid. For starters, it doesn’t allow background images and it has crap support for CSS. See Campaign Monitor’s example here:

Microsoft wants to continue their reign of mediocrity, and I for one, have had ENOUGH.

If you go to fixoutlook.org you can use your Twitter account to send a clear message to Microsoft:

“Wow! @msofficeus is breaking HTML email by using Word to display emails in Outlook 2010. See http://fixoutlook.org and RT”

The site displays every Twitter user who has included “fixoutlook.org” in a tweet. As of 9AM this morning, there have been over 10,000 tweets.  This is an incredibly effective way to help our pleas resonate. It puts face to the name for the petition, which I’m not sure has been done before. Hopefully, this will force Microsoft developers to second guess their decision… Hopefully it will make a difference.

So let’s show the fatcats at MS what the mob mentality can accomplish.  Let our voices be heard!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 24, 2009