Microsoft is currently in Beta on Windows Live Mail. Personally I think it is a steaming pile of garbage. The 'new and improved' email is nothing more than a fancier interface and more color options.

The interface: B
They have taken away the standard HTML ASP interface and replaced it with a new generation of visual and resource eating junk. Sure it looks slightly better but it takes forever to load. It requires so much processing just for displying my inbox that the cooling fan on my laptop kicks up to its highest speed when loading the pages. Sure you can see a list of your folders, the messages in some folder and a message all in the same window now, but is that really so hard to do that they had to have an entire update to the site?

In addition the interface takes sometimes a minute or more to display. What is it doing, calculating missile trajectory in the background?

The Access: F
Lately, moreso over the last week than previously, there are numerous failures to log in with several different error messages. The most cryptic of which is the 'this site cannot login' which means nothing to me. I am already logged in so why can it not just display my inbox as I requested? It seems like all of their sites cannot even manage to play well together. But that should not even be an issue as I have the login page on my Firefox toolbar. So it should go to the same page every time. But eight out of nine times I commonly get some random can't login error and it tells me to signup for a Live ID. An ID which I already have.

The features: D
There are no features. It is still just email with an addressbook and now a calendar. Wow, all this just to get a calendar and new color schemes? It still randomly dumps email into the SPAM folder, it still at times takes hours to send email and really it is not an improvement in any fasion.

Overall: D-

If you have not upgraded from standard I suggest you DO NOT. This is a typical product from Microsoft even though it is in beta. I think it should still be in alpha testing personally because at times I cannot even access my email which is most annoying when there might be time-sensitive documents in it. If you depend on your hotmail account for important emails I suggest looking into another option, like Gmail or even Yahoo. There are ZERO improvements in this deal and there is absolutely no reason to even think about moving to it until they force everyone to and even then I would consider just forwarding all the email to another account.

Where is the 'undo' button so I can go back to the old Hotmail?