Review: Microsoft Outlook email better, but not revolutionary vis a vis Hotmail

One important note: People will be able to keep their existing addresses while using Outlook.com. There's no need to print new business cards replacing Hotmail with a new Outlook.com address. But if you want to change your address, you can get a new one for free. In fact, at least for now, it's still possible to get new Hotmail and Live addresses by signing up through Hotmail.com or Live.com, rather than Outlook.com.

You'll see a lot of improvements when you switch, though nothing feels revolutionary if you've already been using Gmail.

By revolutionary, I mean something along the lines of what Gmail did to email when Google introduced it in 2004.

First, Gmail scrapped the use of folders to organize older messages. Instead, it gives you labels, and you can apply as many as you want to a particular message. So an email among friends to make plans for "The Hobbit'' movie might be filed away as "friends,'' `'movies'' and even "The Hobbit.'' With folders, you had to choose one folder to put your message into or create multiple copies of the messages. It's a relic of the offline world, in which a paper document can only go in one folder without a copying machine.

Meanwhile, those 50 emails it might take to coordinate your movie date with friends could have easily cluttered your inbox. Gmail automatically groups those into "conversations,'' so you see all 50 messages as a single item in your inbox.

These changes took time to get used to,

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