Microsoft announced today a new feature for Hotmail, called EASI ID, allowing you to set up your favorite email address to use Hotmail and get the benefits of features like Sweep, or sending 10GB of (50MB each) pictures in one email.
The new feature begins rolling out today, and should be available within the next few days, according to the Inside Windows Live blog post by Dick Craddock:
Today we begin rolling out a feature that makes it easy to use Hotmail with any existing email address. Just as you can use Microsoft Outlook with an address from any service, you can now do the same with Hotmail on the web.
Implementing this was fairly straightforward given the architecture of Hotmail, our POP aggregation support, and the “Send As” feature that lets you send mail from any validated email address. We just needed to tweak the way we store and look up email addresses, build the first-run experience, and we had it.
To try it out, you just need to register and validate your email address.
Already, commenters on the blog post have come up with some good questions, including:
- Will this end up going with “sent by abc@company.com on behalf of xyz@hotmail.com”?
- Is this POP aggregation similar to the existing “Sending/receiving email from other accounts” feature?
- How many POP accounts can be aggregated? Still just four?
- I have my Yahoo account connected to Windows Live, but it’s getting a lot of spam. Why doesn’t Hotmail’s spam filters work on my Yahoo inbox?
Let us know if you come up with answers for these and any other questions out there on EASI ID, and we’ll dig a bit deeper into it as soon as this pesky “we’re at work” foolishness subsides.
