14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft launched a few days ago its Windows Live Hotmail, which represents the best mail solution on the Internet. At least this is Microsoft's opinion, because the Internet is currently hosting an important battle between Google and Yahoo, the two Internet giants that are struggling to build the most powerful mail solution. Now Microsoft joins the battle and hopes that it can face it and go beyond the other two rivals. Let's have a look at Microsoft's offer and compare it with the other rivals' mail services.
Microsoft improved Windows Live Hotmail from 1GB of free storage size to 2GB to offer more space to its users. Google is currently offering 2.8GB (and growing) while Yahoo is also limited to 1GB. However, the giant portal Yahoo sustained that it will offer unlimited storage space to all the users starting with May 2007. Google also mentioned that it might make a similar move and provide unlimited space soon. So, from this point of view, Google and Yahoo won the battle.
Today, I tried to create a Windows Live Hotmail account to test the new solution and share my opinions with you. Sadly, I was unable to register a new username as the sign-up form was quite unstable and returned a weird error. "We are working to fix a temporary problem with our sign-up service. Please try again." And so I did. I tried to register again and, after I managed to write all the details required by the company, the same error displayed again. "If you continue to get this error try again later," the message says. Sorry Microsoft, but I'm quite disappointed and I believe I'll remain a Gmail fan.
Let's talk a little about the POP3 support offered by the three mail services. Best Syndication observed that Gmail is the only mail solution that offers POP3 integration for free while Yahoo's users have to pay $20 per year to receive this function. Microsoft doesn't currently offer any type of POP3 support but the software giant plans to make the service compatible with Outlook Express.