The feature allows companies to write JavaScript code into their emails, turning them into small live widgets with up-to-date information. The update builds off Hotmail’s Active Views platform, which allowed e-mail users to see a preview of pictures or videos in an email. Microsoft said the advance is the next logical step for e-mail, as it evolves from text and rich HTML to JavaScript.

Currently e-mail users often receive HTML ads that direct users back to websites. But the information in the ads can often be out of date by the time a readers uses it, and the task of clicking through to a web site is enough to discourage some users. But by keeping it all in the e-mail, marketers can eliminate one hurdle in engaging users. For example, an Orbitz customer can start browsing for hotel choices from an e-mail. Completing the purchase will apparently still require a visit to Orbitz.com, but much of the hunting will occur in Hotmail.

Microsoft said other partners like Netflix and LinkedIn will also join the program soon, allowing people to manage their Netflix account or accept LinkedIn invitations from their inbox.

One of the problems that has kept this from happening in the past was security concerns over JavaScript. There has been no way in the past to run JavaScript code without isolating and allowing it to be used maliciously. But Microsoft said the Active Views platform is secure and allows protects users from potential attacks. Microsoft is reportedly only allowing trusted services to use this feature and will use OAuth to connect user inboxes to third-party services. This could be a major issue if Microsoft is proven wrong on this and consumers have their e-mails and their computers compromised. That will be one of the things Microsoft will likely monitor with its pilot program.

It’s unclear how much use non-Hotmail users will get out of this advance or how many companies will be allowed to leverage this tool. For now, only Hotmail users who sign up for interactive emails from the participating companies will receive them. But if Microsoft can prove this is a secure way to bring this functionality to e-mail users without opening them up for attacks, look for other e-mail providers to go down this route.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.):

• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated
• Social Inbox vs. The Future of Email

On Windows, GmailDefaultMaker is a handy free lightweight application that will open mailto: links in your preferred webmail client; despite its name it can route email links to Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo! Mail.

During the installation, you’re asked to specify which webmail provider you’d like to use. It then runs in the background; any time you click on an email link , it will open the compose screen of your webmail client in your default browser with the To: field filled out. It’s simple but effective, although if you want to switch webmail providers you’ll need to re-install it.

On the Mac, you can use Belkadan Software’s Webmailer, a utility that catches mailto: links and sends them to your preferred webmail client. It’s also a free download, and comes pre-configured for several popular webmail clients, including Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Gmail and Hotmail.

(via Download Squad & Lifehacker)

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?
• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated
• How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

Besides a spiffed up interface and improved performance, the new Hotmail sports some new features:

• The ability to open, edit and share Word, Excel and Powerpoint files from within Hotmail
• Video from YouTube can be viewed in your inbox
• A “sweep” menu that helps to clear unwanted email from your inbox
• Send up to 10GB of photos in an email without having to worry about attachment limits (files are sent via SkyDrive)

The rollout of the new version did take quite a while (it started back in May), but Hotmail has around 350 million users, and it sounds like Microsoft was careful to take user feedback into account and tweak the product during the rollout — the automatic sign-in to Windows Messenger has been removed, for example.

Let us know what you think of the changes to Hotmail in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

You can see the new contacts manager at http://contacts.live.com (although some people won’t be able to get at it until the Hotmail rollout is complete). By linking your social networking accounts to Windows Live, you’ll not only be able to access all of your contacts in one place, you’ll also be able to, for example, send messages to Facebook friends from within Windows Live (and you’ll soon be able to IM Facebook friends from Messenger, too).

The service is able to aggregate contact data, so if you have the same contact on Facebook and Messenger, you won’t get a two entries for the same person. It also automatically syncs with all of your services so that your primary address book should always be up-to-date — a very useful feature, and one that my preferred universal contacts manager, Mozilla Contacts, is still missing.

Note: The Hotmail rollout seems to be proceeding extremely slowly, so it’s quite possible you won’t be able to see this new contacts manager yet.

If you’ve received this update, let us know what you think of it in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

The slow rollout might be a little frustrating, but as Microsoft’s Phil Smoot explains, Hotmail’s servers are grouped into clusters, and the new software is being released to a cluster at a time in order to minimize potential problems and downtime. There are more than 100 clusters serving the 360 million or so people who visit Hotmail every month. It may be a while before everyone sees the new version, so I thought that I would ask those lucky WWD readers whose accounts have already been updated: What do you think of the new Hotmail? I’m particularly keen to hear how you think it compares to Gmail.

I imagine the reason Hotmail is suddenly receiving renewed attention is that Microsoft believes revamping a suite of web apps already familiar to users of its desktops products will help it better compete with Google Apps in the cloud (for more on the cloud, check out our Structure conference in June). Hotmail forms part of Windows Live, which will also incorporate the new Office Web Apps (themselves part of Office 2010). The apps are impressive and do look and feel much like their desktop versions.

I actually still have a Hotmail account from way back, which I only now use as a spam trap, as well as for the few friends who resolutely refuse to update their email address books with my more recent contact info. The service has improved quite a lot over the past couple of years — the interface is much nicer and there’s some new functionality (search actually works, for example). But Gmail, to which I switched in 2005, is simply a far better email client, with a better, faster interface and more storage (no more deleting emails because I’d run out of space!). And it consistently receives neat little tweaks to keep it ahead of the pack.

For my purposes, it’s probably too late for Hotmail to win me back. Given the pain that switching email addresses entails, I wouldn’t start using my Hotmail account seriously again unless this update made it far superior to Gmail. And frankly, I can’t see that happening, though I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

What about you, though? Do you still use Hotmail? Could improvements to Hotmail tempt you to change from Gmail?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

To import email from another account into your Gmail account, just go to the “Settings” link that is on the upper right of your Gmail account, and click it.  Once you’ve done that, hit the “Accounts and Import” tab, as seen in the screenshot above. You can import from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, or other webmail or POP3 accounts via a wizard. There’s a “Learn More” link if you get confused. Note that you will need to supply the password for your other account.

I went through the import process for an older Hotmail account I have. I haven’t gotten all the messages imported yet, but Google confirms that this is to be expected: “Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives,” says the post announcing the new features. You can also request to have email sent to the other account forwarded to your Gmail account for 30 days.

This was a long time coming from Google, but it will be convenient to not have to hop between email accounts all the time — especially since one of Gmail’s strengths is its huge storage capacity; that should allow me to cut a couple of accounts that I have altogether.

Hit any snags importing an old account into Gmail? Let us know in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4

Using Google’s Gears platform, the new capability enables users to maintain a local cache of messages which is kept synchronised with Gmail’s servers when and if connectivity becomes available. Features include the ability to read, star and label messages as well as queue messages to be sent from the user’s outbox. Google’s claiming they’re able to provide a near-live representation of the service when in offline mode.You can read Kevin Tofel’s initial impressions of Gmail’s offline support over at jkOntheRun.

Gmail has long offered offline support through standards-based POP and IMAP interfaces, enabling users to wire their Gmail to their email client of choice. Personally, I utilize Gmail’s web interface when connected and, when offline, access my mailboxes through a combination of Gmail’s IMAP support, coupled with Apple Mail. Though these features have worked well historically, even IMAP folders don’t map cleanly onto Gmail’s folder structure – and there can be minor glitches in synchronisation.

What Google is promising is the ability to work in the same environment and with the same features, both offline and online, a precedent that casts some doubt over the usefulness of rich Internet clients, such as those built on Adobe AIR.

Interestingly, buried in today’s news was the announcement that, Hotmail is finally adding POP3 support – eleven years after Microsoft acquired the service! We’ve previously covered how it’s possible to jailbreak Hotmail data and transfer messages out of the ageing app.

If anything illustrates why data portability is important in web-based services (and for web workers), it’s this reality; Microsoft passed an 11-year sentence of imprisonment on its users’ personal data and is now paying the price with a 5 percent decline in its user numbers.

Read more at the Official Gmail blog and Hotmail Now Does POP3.

Have you tried Gmail’s offline support?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Regardless, there must be a good number of such users, to encourage AOL to develop a plugin that enables their users to collect mail from Yahoo!’s email service, a plugin which launched late last week.

Inline with AOL’s recent strategy at the AOL.com home page to embrace and integrate third party content and services within their own properties, Yahoo’s messaging behemoth is now available – albeit as message previews only – within the AOL Mail interface. Users can then click through to their corresponding message at the Yahoo! service.

It’s all kinda, um, underwhelming and the kind of feature that should have been there all along; an indictment of the ‘data prison’ strategies employed by web’s largest properties.

Data portability is a subject I’ve written about many times here at Web Worker Daily, notably with regard to the portability of email data trapped within services such as Hotmail, Google Apps and Outlook…though fortunately (as these links illustrate) each of those services has a third-party ‘jailbreaking option’ to liberate your data.

With much of our personal and professional data now residing ‘in the cloud’ and on remote services, it’s ever more important to press for the ability to export and import data from any service – and insist on the use of standards where possible. I’m sure that the product manager for AOL Mail has come across the IMAP and POP email protocols. Perhaps offering such capabilities by default can weaken the retention of a customer, but its possible to mitigate this by offering data portability or export as a premium option and actually competing on design and features, rather than crippling a service.

Services such as Dopplr and del.icio.us have long had export features baked in – making this central to a service’s design philosophy illustrates a respect and value for the user that is likely to ensure a degree of loyalty.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector provides Outlook users with the capability of synchronizing messages, calendars and contacts with Hotmail and Office Live Mail accounts, effectively providing offline access for those web-based services – and perhaps more importantly, the ability to make that data portable and transferable to other services, such as Gmail.

Previously, the Outlook Connector was a premium service offered to MSN customers, but this incarnation is free to use, though of course, this may change once the beta period is complete. For MSN customers already paying for the older service, they’ll be automatically upgraded to the Live Mail and Live Calendar editions of Hotmail and MSN Calendar.

Though other web-bases services such as Yahoo and Gmail do offer offline access for messages via various IMAP and POP options, offline calendar and contact data remains haphazardly implemented (as illustrated by Google’s recent launch of OS X contact synchronization).

For once it seems Microsoft is ahead of the Web 2.0 crowd with a release that’s profoundly useful – though as rumors build for more and more Google Gears enabled offline applications, it’s a lead that won’t last much longer. On the other hand, Adobe AIR applications may be the carrier for this new wave of applications.

You can download the Outlook Connector 12.1 beta here…

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

After 30th June, Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail application will be the only means by which desktop and offline access to Hotmail accounts will be supported. This effectively means that a Hotmail user’s messages continue to be imprisoned within a closed ecosphere of services and applications. OK, smart people won’t be using Outlook, Outlook Express or Hotmail, but millions do and many have years of messages archived that they may wish to continue accessing outside a web-based interface.

However, there are some unofficial mechanisms that can not only continue to provide offline and desktop access, but also standards-based access into most email clients

• IzyMail has close to a decade of experience in delivering webmail gateway services. A one-off payment of $17.95 buys a one-year subscription that equips any Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail account with a POP and IMAP ‘wrapper’, so users can send, receive and synchronise messages using most desktop clients, such as Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Outlook

• Thunderbird’s WebMail extension plays a similar role to IzyMail, though is of course limited only to Thunderbird and doesn’t necessarily support the various permutations of a service like Hotmail (Live Hotmail, Hotmail Classic etc.) but does support a wider range of services

• Apple Mail fans can use a similar plugin – HTTP Mail – to retrieve Hotmail messages and folder.

Of these solutions, I’d recommend IzyMail’s standards-based approach, freeing the user to employ any both leading mail protocols with the widest range of clients. Indeed, IzyMail saw a huge spike in subscriptions with the launch of the iPhone last Summer as users utilised POP and IMAP webmail gateways to synchronise their email with their phones.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4