The Email Wars

Login in today to check for delivery for a client campaign to MSN as a whitelisted sender, and invite popped up to move to Beta. Well I can’t turn that one down, even with the note:
Will be able to see all my old mail if I participate in this beta?
All of your mail will remain on our servers during the Mail Beta program. While we do not anticipate issues, due to the test environment, we cannot guarantee that all mail will be viewable through the beta.

And it ONLY works on IE 6.0 and above. So much for checking my mail on my Mac as well.

The Announcement:

See the Full Size View

It Reads:
Check out Mail Beta.
Then tell us how to make it better.

We figure that as a Hotmail user, you know as much as anyone about how an e-mail service should work. That’s why we want you to check out Mail Beta, a new version of the service that we’re working on. If you accept, you will be among the first to see some very cool new features, and you can tell us exactly what you think of them: what you love, what you hate, and what you’d rather see.

More about what Mail Beta can do for you:

Reading Pane See a preview of each message (just like Microsoft Outlook), and cruise from e-mail to e-mail without reloading a new page each time. One click shows you a message’s full contents.

Info Bar The Info Bar is a new weapon to help you zap junk and “phishing” e-mail off the face of the earth. (”Phishing” is when someone is trying to fool you into giving up your personal info with an official-looking message).

Address AutoComplete Start typing a name and “pow!” up pops a list of possible recipients from your contact list. Click on the one you want and you’re done.

Expanded Storage Your Mail Beta inbox will have 2GB (2 gigabytes) of storage. That’s a lot. Enough for 1,000 photos of 2 MB (megabytes) each, for example.