According to several sources (which will be posted at bottom of this post), Hotmail breaks special characters and turns them into graphical emoji since recently.
Here’s an example of the (r) special character being turned into a large image in Windows Love Hotmail’s own email:
Thankfully, Elliot Ross from Emaildesignreview.com posted a workaround solution to this a few days ago here. (more…)
The new Outlook 15 email client, which will be part of the Office 15 suite by Microsoft, will have some nice new features especially heavy on social networking. A preview has been posted by Winsupersite.com.
For email marketers there’s also some not so good news, but that will follow at the end of the article.
First up, Outlook 15 will have native integration with Hotmail. Next to that, social network integration includes Facebook and LinkedIn. Like the Windows Mobile 7 OS, the Contacts part is now called People, making it consistent across Microsoft’s line of software products.
A few screenshots:
Social integration – info being called up:
More:
Outlook 15 will also include a weather bar in the Calendar:
One nice feature is the inline replies part. When replying, normally a new window would pop up. Now replies will be composed in the preview pane, just like the Outlook Web app:
A new feature called Peeks allows the lookup of information on objects without leaving your current working window (below calendar):
The not so good news for email marketers is the fact that Outlook 15 will still use Word as the email editor and render engine. This means that we’ll still have to code like it’s 1999 as is the case with Outlook 2007 and 2010.
This summer a public beta is expected of the Office 15 suite, and full release of the software is expected late this year. This will fall in line with the Windows 8 release.
Heads up! This post is not just for email marketers but for every single one of you sending email. That means all of you! Every time you send an email, you should decide whether you should send it…or not. Until Fluent gets accessible to all (Gmail only and beta-invite for now), this is necessary.
Should I send this email? The question isn’t odd, as many people are swamped in email these days. It goes back quite a few years actually, the trend of declaring email bankruptcy. This Gawker page notes cases of people way back in 2004 (that’s 8 years ago everyone! Facebook, Twitter and such didn’t exist yet!) declaring email bankruptcy.
Here’s the top part of the walkthrough:
Click the above image to view the full image. The image includes the story of Atos (read it here), and the outcome: 20% less email. That’s quite the decrease! (more…)
RIM’s Blackberry PlayBook has finally received a software update to handle email the way Blackberry smartphones do. Last week the update was released, so now users of the PlayBook don’t need to tether the device to a Blackberry anymore. They can now use the PlayBook email directly on the device.
The tablet is powered by the new Blackberry tablet OS based on QNX, which is planned to be released on a Blackberry smartphone later this year as well. Being the single device now sporting the QNX-based OS, it doesn’t have many apps available. However, as part of the software update it is now possible to run Android-based apps on the PlayBook: a big plus as the Android Market has a lot more apps available. (more…)
Three former Google employees from Sydney, Australia have been working on a solution called Fluent for the inbox overload many people are facing these days.
Key features include:
- New service displays email as a “stream” like Facebook
- Shows attachments like photos as a slide show
-Multiple account support for a single login
- Allows instant searching through emails as you type
The team consists of Cameron Adams, Dhanji Prasanna and Jochen Bekmann. After Google halted development on Google Wave, Adams and Prasanna quit (with Bekmann following later) to work on Fluent.
One of the key goals of the new email handling platform is to have people take action on messages received right away, instead of reading into all the details. This should make working with email about 20% more efficient.
Here’s what the interface looks like:
Recently Google’s CEO Larry Page shared some milestones during the company’s 2011 earnings conference call. One of the most interesting numbers shared was that the Gmail webservice now has 350 million users. This is a big jump from the 260 million people that were using Gmail back in October 2011, just 3 months ago.
The most recent number of Hotmail users is from March 2010 which sits at 369 million users, expectations are that that number has grown since then, but not by much.
A quote from Larry Page during the earnings call: