By Emeka Aginam
As part of its mission to reimagine personal email  from the datacenter all the way to the user experience, the software giant, Microsoft yesterday  delivered  on that goal with a preview of its  new Outlook.com ,  modern email designed for the next billion mailboxes.

Brian Hall, spokesperson of Windows Corporate Communications team   in  a telephone meeting press conference hosted  yesterday said that  that it was right  time to  reimagine email by  introducing a preview of Outlook.com.

He said that this is a    break from the past by building a   brand new service from the ground up.

Highlights of the solution, according to Microsoft will include the following:

Modern experience for modern browsers and devices:

Part  of the highlights, according to Hall  was  is that  the product gives a fresh, clean user interface that is  intuitive to use, works across your devices with Exchange ActiveSync, and gets the clutter out of  user’s  way with 60% fewer pixels in the header and 30% more messages visible in your inbox. In addition to this, there is no display ads or large search boxes that take up that extra space.

Connected to friends and co-workers:

Additionally, the outlook.com preview,  he  explained has the capability to be  connected to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and soon, Skype.

With the solution, according Hall , users can view pictures of  their friends, messages, status updates, chats, calls, all powered by an always up-to-date contact list that is similarly connected to those networks.

Smart and powerful:

Outlook.com, the software giant added has the ability to  automatically sorts your messages from contacts, newsletters, shipping updates, and social updates, and with sweep you can move or delete them in a few clicks.

Accordingly, the service includes free Office Web Apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, as well as SkyDrive.

Puts you in control:

The solution, Microsoft explained further  keeps user’s personal mail personal (no ads in person-to-person mails and no scanning your personal mail to serve ads), and has great tools for power users.

Interestingly, all the basics virtually unlimited storage and industry-leading spam protection are included in the in Outlook.com.

It would be recalled that webmail was first introduced with HoTMaiL in 1996. Back then, it was novel to have a personal email address you could keep for life – one that was totally independent from your business or internet service provider.

Eight years later, Google introduced Gmail, which included 1 GB of storage and inbox search.

And while Gmail and other webmail services like Hotmail have added some features since then, not much has fundamentally changed in webmail over the last 8 years – though yesterday’s frustrations about the small size of inboxes are now things of the past.

At the same time, email is becoming less and less useful as inboxes become cluttered with newsletters and social updates, and people increasingly keep up their personal connections in social networks instead of their email address books. All of this has led many to hope for a better solution so you don’t have to settle for today’s webmail.