Microsoft Wants You to Manage Your Gmail from Your Hotmail

                                                 

       Hotmail has released a cool new feature today: the ability to receive and send e-mails from other addresses, including ones from Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

The new feature, announced by Microsoft earlier today, is pretty straightforward. Users just have to register and validate their outside e-mail addresses, which then allows them to manage their outside e-mail accounts from inside Hotmail via POP.

Hotmail users already have the ability to send e-mails from another address through the “Send As” feature, but today’s update provides a more complete e-mail management experience.

Gmail and Yahoo Mail both have similar features for managing multiple e-mail accounts. Microsoft is hoping to keep users familiar with the Hotmail interface on their servers by making it easy to manage their other e-mail accounts via the service. Some people have work accounts they’d rather manage via Hotmail; others might not want to send messages from the Hotmail domain but still like the interface. These are the types of users Microsoft is targeting.

With nearly 350 million users, Hotmail is still by far the most popular webmail service around, but Microsoft is feeling the pressure from its competition. The tech giant recently revamped its webmail client with a slew of new features to keep it competitive with its Google and Yahoo counterparts.