I had a hotmail from way back and was going to swap (only held back by the lock in of my current email address being everywhere), but honestly now I don't see much reason to. Hotmail web interface is close enough to the gmail one now and windows live mail integrates nicely if your running and windows machine.
1) The back button doesn't function as you'd like.
2) With Chrome as the browser at least, checking an item can result in all other checked items being unchecked - this I think happens only after the first AJAX postback.
3) Logging in takes you to a page other than the inbox - that's an unnecessary additional click
4) The spam filter isn't a patch on Gmail's.
5) The search filtering has nothing on Gmail's
6) Because it uses .NET's AJAX methods as opposed to another model such as jquery ajax + web services, all actions involve posting back the entire page and therefore hotmail is much slower than gmail. (*This is an assumption based on how slow hotmail is - I haven't checked in firebug).
7) Last time I checked you can't auto-forward mail.
All this said, I still use my ancient hotmail address whenever I need to post an email address in public or give an email address to a company that's likely to spam me. Perhaps it's the same with the article's poster.
Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of the above
If you're referring to .NET's UpdatePanels, they do send the entire post data, yes. But the response only contains required HTML to rerender that area.
ASP.NET can also take any "web service" (i.e., a bunch of function you define and mark as directly callable via XML or whatever), and VS will generate JavaScript proxy objects for it. Then you get lightweight calls (only send and receive parameters and response), but get IntelliSense and stuff on them.
Hotmail might do something stupid and be slow. I don't know or care, but .NET offers plenty of options.
I had a hotmail from way back and was going to swap (only held back by the lock in of my current email address being everywhere), but honestly now I don't see much reason to. Hotmail web interface is close enough to the gmail one now and windows live mail integrates nicely if your running and windows machine.