Microsoft Outlook.com e-mail

Pros: Separate left-side pane for folder operations; can sign out without scrolling to top.

Cons: Sluggish, lots of glitches, quirky behavior and anomalies. Minimal developer supported Help--a few FAQs but mostly wiki help from other users (who are obviously frustrated at times).

Summary: I fully agree with a previous review (pete592) and have my own points to add. The mistake the CNET reviewer made is comparing Outlook to GMail; it should have been compared to Hotmail, which had some useful features, many gone w/ Outlook. One example: Being able to collect contacts into groups so you can give the group a name and send to all in it. Can't find a way to do this anymore--or to edit Groups already there from Hotmail. MS' Outlook HELP website (almost totally wiki except for a minimal set of FAQs). Also, now when signing out, we get sent to...a page that says: YOU HAVE SIGNED OUT. Wow! Terrific. Used to go to MSN at least. Now to NOTHING. Would be nice to be able to direct to a chosen site. Seems much more sluggish than Hotmail was. As for anomalies, sometimes the cursor turns into a pointing finger, sometimes not. Right now, I find that my Inbox folder shows one new letter but there's none in the Inbox. Adressee autocomplete takes far too long to bring up the correct name; can usually finish entering it manually before this happens. I could go on but it gets tiresome. Suffice it to say that continued development is really warranted.

There are some improvements: separate folder pane on the left; separate ad pane on the right; (Oh wait--not an improvement at all. More like a pain.) ability to sign out w/o scrolling to the top of a page. That said, I think many longtime Hotmail users would take what they used to have over what they are now forced to use.