Microsoft's edge over Google in webmail services [Selfwritten]

Microsoft & Google are certainly the two biggest fishes in the world of web services.
Google's Gmail made a remarkable growth in the past years, offering a matchless & reliable service over the competitors. Microsoft's Windows live mail (formerly Hotmail) is still the second largest email provider after Yahoo & Gmail follows, determined to soon leave behind Microsoft. We won't talk about Yahoo now, since this is beyond the scope of the topic. I personally always loved these two web mail providers & Live mail is as good as Gmail, is what I feel. Infact there are certain features that are unique to each of them, & so I love to use both at the same time. Live mail is best in terms of displaying ads on the mail homepage, as Live mail has only one graphical ad in contrast to Yahoo, where ads are cluttered all over & piss me off! If you wondered that Gmail has only text based ads & hence it should be better than Live mail, think again! Live mail even beats Gmail in this as though Live mail has a graphical ad, but that is only one, in contrast to Gmail where there are 50s of text based ads! And the worst part is that Gmail's automatic system actually 'reads' your each & every mail, every single line & then generate the related text based ads using these keywords, so where is the privacy? Live mail & Yahoo or any other web based mail puts the ads randomly, without any correlation to your mail content. Windows live mail is soon going to implement the following security features that are much secure than gmail, take a look-

• Trusted senders. With the new Hotmail, we help you to visually identify trusted senders in your inbox, particularly banks and other senders most commonly impersonated in phishing scams, by putting safety logos next to those senders who we recognize as legitimate.

• Full-session SSL - In addition to providing SSL encryption of credentials at login for all accounts, the new Hotmail will soon support the option to maintain SSL encryption between you and Microsoft servers during your entire Hotmail session.

• Single-use codes - This new security feature is designed to further help protect you by giving you the option to ask Hotmail to SMS to you a one-time temporary password if you’d prefer not to use your regular password when logging into Hotmail on public computers that could potentially harbor key logging malware that could steal your password, such as those sometimes found in internet cafes and airports.
• Account security information - The new security platform elements we’ve built up around Hotmail now enable you to use your cell phone or other items as proof of account ownership. For example, if you lose your password or, worse, if your account gets compromised, we can now send you an account recapture code via an SMS message or enable you to regain access to your account.

I personally loved the 'Single-use codes' feature of Live mail. :) More over the Microsoft office web apps are much better than the Google docs. "The moment you receive an Office document as an attachment in Hotmail - Word, Excel or PowerPoint - you can open and view the attachment online in any popular browser, on PC or Mac and even if Office is not installed," Microsoft said in its latest announcement. "This results from the seamless integration between Hotmail, SkyDrive [Microsoft's free online storage service] and the Office Web Apps, so you can send, receive and work on a document with others."

So I Personally use both Gmail & Hotmail (Oops live mail) and love both.

* Get an @msn.com Windows live mail (Hotmail) account HERE! ;-)