Even though Microsoft has bid Hotmail farewell, it seems much excited about the fresh updates that it has been rolling out for Outlook.com, a webmail service which had been launched in February. For starters, the company has managed to transfer roughly 400,000 million active accounts from the former email utility to the latter.
Out of these, approximately 125 million user IDs are the ones accessing emails, calendars and contacts through their mobile devices with the help of Exchange ActiveSync. What comes across as a shocking piece of information is that it has taken merely six weeks to conduct the entire migration of content which sums up to 150 petabytes.
Just to give us a gist of the magnitude of content that has been transferred, the company has released an infographic. This compares 150 petabytes to 300,000 years of listening to music over an MP3 player and 120 million years of sending emails, provided 50 mails were sent per day.
Two new features have been added to the most recent email service. ‘SMTP send’ being the first one, allows people to forward mails via different accounts easily. For instance, the update addresses the ‘on behalf of’ issue. Those who are unfamiliar with this term should note that whenever a mail from another account, for example Gmail or Yahoo, was sent through the service in question, recipients would be exposed to both the user IDs as seen in the upper portion of the image embedded below.
Next up is deeper integration with SkyDrive, which includes facilities like a single Microsoft account for logging in, common contact list and more. Users will moreover receive a photo mail as soon as they insert pictures from the cloud storage service. This functionality has already taken the leap and should be made available in the coming weeks across the globe.
The company has taken the effort to answer a few queries related to Outlook.com. To begin with, it says that people will not feel the need to change their email addresses and can continue utilizing the Hotmail ID. Because of this, they will have to make no changes to their phone or app settings as well. While quite a bit of developments have taken place this time, we have been told that there is still a lot left to come.