Webware

E-mails sent to a non-Hotmail address have been copied to a folder within a Hotmail account in Windows Live Mail.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

I blogged about Gmail's new feature that helps you migrate from other Web-based e-mail services to Gmail and I have received a lot of e-mails asking if there's a way to back up an offline POP3 e-mail archive to an online e-mail service.

The answer is yes, but depending on what e-mail clients you use, it can require a fair amount of work. If you're using Outlook Express, for example, it's fairly easy. If you use Thunderbird, however, there will be a few extra steps.

The Thunderbird <-> Outlook Express archive convert tool.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

First, you will need a Hotmail account, if you don't yet have one; it's free to sign up. After that, download and use Windows Live Mail to connect with the Hotmail account. This process is pretty straightforward.

Windows Live Mail synchronizes with your Hotmail account, which means all the e-mails you have downloaded to your computer will remain on the Hotmail server and be available for you to view using a Web browser.

Apart from Hotmail.com and Live.com e-mail accounts, Windows Live Mail can also handle other types of accounts, including POP3. When you have multiple e-mail accounts with Windows Live Mail, each account will have a separate set of "Inbox," "Sent Items," "Drafts," and so on, as well as other user-created folders.

If you want to upload an existing Outlook Express e-mail archive to your Hotmail account, first run Windows Live Mail and import your Outlook Express messages. (To do this, press Alt-F then choose "Import" on the menu). Once the import process is done, create a new folder within your Hotmail account and name it, say, "POP3 backup." You can create different folders for different groups of e-mails. After that, you can drag and drop or copy messages from the POP3 import into these new folders.

Now all you need to do is sync the Hotmail account and voila! You will see those added folders and e-mails you've just imported on the Hotmail server. This means you can access them wherever you are via a browser and they are saved in Hotmail server.

The sync process can take a long time if you have a big POP3 archive (and a slow connection), and, of course, you can't sync any archive larger than the space allowed by Hotmail, which is 5GB.

If you use Outlook, you can first use Outlook Express to import Outlook's archive before doing the process. Basically, you can use Outlook Express as the intermediary for the import process.

An e-mail sent to a non-Hotmail account has been backed up to the Hotmail server and can be viewed by a Web browser.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

For ThunderBird users, you can use the eml2mbox function of this free conversion tool called IMAPSize to convert Thunderbird's e-mail archive into Outlook Express' format.

Of course, once you have those e-mails in a Hotmail account, you can always import them into Gmail by using the new migration tool. It's good to keep data at multiple places anyway.

So make this your weekend project and back up those precious messages.

With a new product called Vine, Microsoft is tackling the issue that, in the Digital Age, contact management is no longer static--where you are and what you're doing at a given moment can matter just as much as what your cell phone number is. But instead of focusing on roving business travelers, Vine's slant is community management and emergency preparedness. It's in a private beta test right now.

Here's how it works. You download a "dashboard" application, and then you log in with your Windows Live account. Its interface takes the form of a map, where geo-tagged notifications pop up if a news story or public safety announcement--sourced from 20,000 news sources as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)--happens in a specific location. (You can set preferences to only display stories from locations and areas of interest that you care about.)

Your contacts are also listed on the dashboard, where you can check out alerts that they've sent you or even just keep tabs on their Facebook status messages. "Alerts" pop up like instant messages (or text messages, as you can opt to get them on your cell phone). You can also "check in" to let your neighbors know you're at home safe if, say, there's a tornado on the rampage outside, or if you're out of town.

Existing real-time, find-who's-where applications typically have a nightlife slant, like Buzzd and Foursquare. But Microsoft hopes that the same tools of convening can be used to organize community activities and stay in touch in the event of an emergency.

The company has unveiled the product in its home city of Seattle, and, according to the Seattle Times, plans to beta-test it there in addition to a rural Midwestern town and an "isolated island community," which makes the whole thing sound just a little bit Dharma Initiative. Just a little.

All joking aside, the Web's biggest players are gunning for a way to appropriately harness social media for emergency preparedness. Google's nonprofit Google.org arm has launched a project called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD) with similar goals, and Google has invested $5 million in it. InSTEDD does not have a live software product yet, but organizers have said that it plans to use, among other things, a mash-up of SMS alerts and the Google Earth mapping application.

(Credit: Joystiq)

Game for Windows - LIVE (GFWL) is an online gaming service for "Games for Windows"-branded PC games. It functions much like an Xbox Live, but for the PC. On Tuesday Microsoft announced a couple of updates to the service.

In an effort to prevent game piracy, Microsoft will be implementing zero-day piracy protection and server-side authentication, that hopefully will help prevent game piracy before a game's street date, and include added protection for publishers and users by requiring authentication for online play.

To help users access additional game content in the most seamless way possible, GFWL is implementing a new marketplace API that, once implemented, will allow users to purchase additional game content while in-game, apparently without necessitating a restart.

For those of us that call many places our gaming home, lastly on the list is Roaming. Users can now save their personal settings back to their GFWL account in the cloud, providing access to their settings on any compatible and connected Windows PC.

Check out the Steamworks announcement made by valve today to see if you can pick out the similarities.

On Tuesday, Microsoft released version 4.0 of Windows Live Search Mobile, its downloadable search and map app for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, which the company demoed last week at CES.

With this release, Microsoft is finally starting to catch up to other free clients doing mobile voice and text search on other platforms--Google Mobile App, Yahoo Go, and Vlingo among them.

From left to right: bird's eye view, query auto-suggest, and directions.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Taking a page from Google's book, perhaps, the new Locate Me feature in Windows Live Search Mobile can work on non-GPS phones to zero in on your approximate location. If that fails, you can easily add your location manually instead.

Predictive text is also new--when you type a query into the search box, the app will suggest a search term in order to save your fingers some typing. The app did better remembering past queries than it did predicting new ones, and it did not begin suggesting new search terms until we were almost done typing them.

In addition, the search box will now accept mixed queries; for instance, if you speak or type a business name and city into the search box, you'll see results for the business in that second location, without changing your master location. Hunting down a Dunkin' Donuts in Boston when you're living in San Francisco is one example.

Bird's Eye View is the splashiest of the added features, adding a third mode to map-viewing that's akin to Google's Street View. The landmarks we saw were clear, but the view is limited to "select urban areas" and grays out if the one you want isn't part of it. We hope the selection will expand soon.

These additions enhance Windows Live Search's otherwise well-integrated features--click-to-call, SMS, driving directions, and search modules that focus on traffic, movies, gas stations, and weather in your area.

We give Microsoft credit for finally understanding that what works on a console won't necessarily appeal to PC gamers. First, it stripped away the much-derided, fee-based Games for Windows Live Gold membership level. Now the entire Games for Windows Live interface has received an update. The Xbox 360-style "blade" interface is gone, replaced by a fully mouse-driven drop-down menu system. If it only worked as well as it should.

To clarify, you're not intended to download a GFW Live client for your PC, at least not yet (technically you can). For the moment, you're instead supposed to launch any GFW Live-enabled game, log in to the Live service, and from there follow the update prompt. Microsoft says a separate downloadable client is coming, along with a PC gaming-oriented Marketplace that will sell updated content for GFW Live-supported games.

The main Games for Windows Live menu (GamerTag redacted).

(Credit: CNET)

For now, you can use the GFW Live service to socialize and find people to play with from your Windows or Xbox Live friends lists. It also includes an achievement system, as well as an update monitor, which can be both a blessing and a curse. For example, the recent Fallout 3 patch has its share of problems, but GFW Live requires you to update, or else it will log you out (the same is true of Valve's Steam service, GFW Live's primary competition).

Microsoft is announcing a series of changes to its Windows Live services aimed to give more of a social-networking flavor to the company's communications services.

With the update, Spaces, Windows Live Hotmail, and Windows Live Messenger will get deeper ties with one another. While stressing that it is not trying to create a new social-networking site, Microsoft is nonetheless adopting concepts like news feeds and profiles that have made such services so popular.

"The general thing people are trying to do in all of these services is keep in touch," said Brian Hall, the general manager for Windows Live.

The software maker is trying to expand the amount of time users spend in Windows Live, which Hall said already gets 11 percent of all Internet minutes, thanks largely to the popularity of Hotmail and Messenger.

On top of those, Microsoft is adding a revamped Windows Live Home page that focuses on a news feed of actions taken by one's contacts as well as new types of views that focus on what a particular person or group is up to.

To populate its news feed, users will have the option to include their activities from a variety of other sites. The company has signed up reviews sites like Amazon and Yelp, blogging sites like WordPress and Twitter, as well as some less well-known social-networking sites.

"Facebook and MySpace are not on there right now," Hall said. "We're announcing a set of partners that are deploying in December."

Photo sharing is a particular area of focus, with Microsoft offering its own storage options, as well as linking to third-party sites such as Photobucket and Yahoo's Flickr. Starting next year, HP will also bundle Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery software with its consumer printers.

As for the changes to Windows Live itself, glimmers of the update are visible now, though most features are only in private testing and won't be visible to the masses until next month, Hall said. For example, the latest public beta version of Windows Live Messenger has a "What's new" feature, but for now it only shows things such as changing a profile picture within Messenger.

As part of the latest changes, Microsoft is also upping the amount of storage provided with its SkyDrive service to 25GB from 5GB.

Part of this wave of changes is also the update to Windows Live Hotmail, in which Microsoft has merged its standard and classic modes--a move that left some users grumbling.

Interestingly, Classic mode was an afterthought in the major Hotmail overhaul Microsoft did several years ago. Throughout the redesign, though, it took on added importance until it became the default mode when the revamped Web mail program ultimately launched.

Telefonica, the largest telecommunications provider in Latin America, announced on Friday that it has officially been chosen by Microsoft to provide voice over Internet Protocol services to Windows Live Messenger customers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, the United States, and Venezuela.

Dubbed Voype, Telefonica's VoIP service works with Live Messenger and will enable Windows Live customers to make calls directly from their PCs to any landline or mobile phone in the world.

Obviously taking aim at eBay's popular Skype Internet telephony technology, Microsoft's Live Messenger VoIP solution may not be such a bad choice. Calls to and from other Live Messenger users are free, and calls made to landlines or cell phones in the United States cost just $0.014 per minute.

Rates are slightly higher in Canada and the United Kingdom--$0.055 and $0.023 per minute, respectively--but the service's rate list reveals relatively competitive pricing. In fact, calls made in the States are cheaper on Voype than those made on Skype. Skype currently charges $0.021 for all calls sent to people in the United States.

That said, Voype is still in its infant stages. It's currently available in select countries around the world but will soon be made available to customers in Latin America, which could increase its installed base.

More importantly, current Voype users won't be able to receive calls on their PC. According to Telefonica, that functionality is scheduled for release at a "later point," as part of the "second phase."

On Monday, Microsoft updated two of its Live services: Windows Live Hotmail and Live Maps. Of the two, the changes to Hotmail are not yet available to everyone. The company began rolling it out to some of its users this weekend, with everyone else getting their hands on it in the next few weeks. It's the newer, faster version of the service that brings in gains of up to 70 percent compared with older versions of Hotmail. (Read more about that here.)

Meanwhile, Live Search Maps, Microsoft's online mapping tool has a really neat new way to get directions using local landmarks and local businesses. If the service picks up on one of these landmarks as part of your route, it will use it in addition to the street name. Oftentimes this comes in handy where a business has better signage than the city, which in the case of car dealerships and fast food restaurants is almost always true.

Click to enlarge

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Chris Pendleton, Microsoft Virtual Earth's Tech Evangelist, says these landmarks are currently limited to these six categories:

• Gas Stations
• Major National Chains of Hotels
• Restaurants
• Convenience Stores
• Grocery Stores
• Car Dealerships

To help get you there, there's a new multistop trip planner--a feature Google Maps has had since late 2006. This means you can add other addresses between the point A and point B of your trip, then print it out to stick in your car.

The service is also now instantly indexing community maps. Maps that users have created will now be able to be searched by everyone immediately. The user-created items will also be mixed in with business results, which means you or someone else could enter in a business' address and phone number before it's been officially added and have it show up in regular searches. Neat.

Late last week Microsoft quietly released an update to its Live Mesh product to support mobile access. From your phone's Web browser you can access the service via m.mesh.com. If you're on a Windows Mobile device, or any other phone that supports file system access you can upload files over the Web to your Live Mesh storage--something that's helpful for things like photos taken from your phone's digital camera.

In addition to the file browser, the mobile version of Mesh includes the same news feed functionality that lets you track all the changes to stored files. Missing is an installable client, which is on the horizon and will provide real-time file changes and deeper system integration on supported handsets.

Mesh opened up to everyone late last week. Microsoft's vision of creating a syncing tool for anyone echos Apple's latest online subscription service, MobileMe. The key difference is in price and device support with Apple's solution costing $99 a year and offering deep integration with the iPhone. Incidentally, earlier on Monday, blog LiveSide also got their hands on a pre-beta version of the upcoming Mac client of Live Mesh which has Finder integration but no remote desktop support unlike its Windows cousin.

Microsoft's solution may not be as developed as Apple's (yet), but it will be far more open with eventual support for a multitude of devices with no cost for the end user. Microsoft is expected to unveil a development platform later this year that should let application creators tie in their services for file access and notifications.

Grab files from Mesh on any mobile device, including the iPhone. But sending them to your cloud storage requires a Windows Mobile or Symbian handset.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)