What email service should you use? How should you pick? Obviously, we’d love people to pick Hotmail. But, in the end, you should choose the service that works best for you. One thing is for sure – you should be able to choose.

At Hotmail, we believe that your email belongs to you, not to the company that runs your service, and it should be easy to try out a new service and switch if that service works better for you. That’s why we make it easy to upgrade to Hotmail from your old service, and easy to access all the data that belongs to you with powerful, easy-to-use features like mail forwarding and free POP access.

We’re committed to making Hotmail the world’s best email service. We’ve come a long way in the past few years, and Hotmail is better than it has ever been. In fact, Hotmail recently won the PCMag.com Editor’s Choice award, and our innovative work on Active Views is letting partners like Netflix, LinkedIn, Posterous, and others blaze a trail of new ways to get more done in your inbox.

Hotmail has also been innovating with great features for organizing your inbox, like filters, quick views, and Sweep, and better ways to keep in touch with the people you care about most, like Messenger chat in your inbox – it even lets you chat with your Facebook buddies.

We’ve made switching easy

There are two big reasons that keep people from switching email services: having to learn a new interface, and changing email identities, so we set out to take the hassle out of both of these.

Hotmail puts you in control. Check out all the ways you can customize how you use Hotmail:

• Reading pane – you can turn on the reading pane and put it on the right or at the bottom of your inbox. You can even turn it off to see as many messages as possible.
• Conversation threading – some people love it, some don’t. You get to choose. See all your conversations rolled up into a single thread, or see them as individual messages. You can also sort your inbox by date, from, or subject.
• Filters, quick views, folders – some people are pilers, some are filers. Hotmail works the way you do: file all your messages away, or leave everything in the inbox and use powerful search, filters, and quick views to find what you’re looking for fast.
• Keyboard shortcuts – if you use ‘em, you love ‘em. Why learn new ones? Hotmail lets you choose either Outlook or Gmail shortcuts.

With Hotmail, you don’t even need to change your identity. You can try out Hotmail or switch and you don’t even have to give up your old email address.

• Mail aggregation lets you get email in Hotmail from any ISP or mail service that supports POP3. You don’t even need a Hotmail address to get started – just use your own email address.
• Aliases let you choose the email address you want without having to give up your old address or any of your email data.
• Universal address book lets you connect services like LinkedIn or Facebook to your Hotmail contact list. You can also import your contacts from any email service right into Hotmail, so you get all your contacts in one place.

And of course, Hotmail is available wherever you are:

• Your PC – Use our web interface at http://hotmail.com, or use Microsoft Outlook, or our powerful (and free) Windows Live Mail client.
• Your phone – You can sync your mail, calendar and contacts using Exchange ActiveSync to your iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone. And any phone with a browser can get to Hotmail’s mobile web interface.
• Your iPad – Yep, you can even get Hotmail on your iPad via the website (hotmail.com) or by setting up Hotmail in the iPad’s Mail app using Exchange ActiveSync.

When you’re ready to switch, Hotmail makes it easy with TrueSwitch.  You can bring over all your email, folders, and contacts from another service and start using Hotmail full time. Brandon LeBlanc has a post over on the Windows Experience blog that walks you through exactly what you'll encounter if you decide to use TrueSwitch.

We believe that your data is yours – not ours. So features like free POP access and mail forwarding let you get your email wherever you want it. Not all services treat your data the same way. That’s why we created http://switchtoHotmail.com, where you can learn all about how to try out and switch to Hotmail’s award-winning service.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail

Hotmail (with SkyDrive and Messenger) provides free email and collaboration services for 360 million people around the world. Over 30 million of them have tried out Office Web Apps in just the first six months they were available.  Microsoft also offers Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync for millions of businesses and other organizations. And with today’s launch of Office 365 beta, businesses of all sizes can now easily use these products as an integrated suite of email and collaboration services, designed with the key management and administrative features they need.

In delivering these services, we’d like to provide a view of the differences between the communication tools that organizations want and what individuals are asking for. Office 365 is focused mainly on the needs of organizations. Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Messenger are focused on individuals. They're similar and work together – and yet are tailored for the unique needs of each. 

We believe the important thing here is to listen to our customers and continue to evolve these services so that we’re delivering the right features for the right customers. Sometimes this means features from Hotmail will move into Office 365 and vice versa. By offering both Hotmail and Office 365, we get the opportunity to share a lot of code between the services, and learn a great deal from each other. This helps ensure that we can give customers the best solution – with two services designed to make personal and work life easier to manage.

If you have a business or influence IT decisions in your organization, we encourage you to visit http://office365.microsoft.com, join the beta, and provide feedback on Office 365.

Dharmesh Mehta
Director, Windows Live Product Management