• PC World, Tuesday, May 18, 2010 1:49 PM

Taking it to the incessantly innovating Gmail and reigning market leader Yahoo Mail, Microsoft's Hotmail is undergoing its first major overhaul in some time. Expected to debut by mid- to late-summer, Microsoft's strategy is "not about aiming for feature parity with Gmail," according to PCWorld. Rather, the basics of Hotmail's look and feel will remain largely unchanged.

"Judged on its own terms ... this new Hotmail is appealing -- and most of what's new really is new, with no precise equivalent in Gmail," PCWorld writes. New features will include the ability to select messages in one's inbox, and then move or delete them en masse, and then choose to automatically apply the same action to future messages from the senders in question. Also, a new row of "View" links lets users filter their inbox to show only unread messages, only ones from contacts, only social-networking updates from services such as Facebook, only messages from groups, or "Everything else." With regarding to adverting, "Whether you're in your inbox or reading a message, a tall, skinny ad sits on the right hand of the screen," notes PCWorld. "Something needs to pay for Hotmail, of course, and you can eliminate ad by paying $20 a year."

Read the whole story at PC World »