Hotmail is dead. Now, don't give me the looks. I know it's been dead for years. But now it is well and truly dead, thanks to its new avatar - Outlook.com.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the preview of Outlook.com, its new email platform. Though it was my first mail id, I haven't been using Hotmail since Gmail started sending out invites in late 2004. But after logging on to the new Outlook, I am having second thoughts about retaining Gmail as my primary mail account. Not because it is some out of the box mail solution, but because it is clean - the reason why I shifted to Gmail in the first place. After about eight years of service my Gmail is a cluttered mess with scores of unwanted and thousands of unread mails.

Outlook, as I said, is the best clean-up act for email since Google's mail service . It is also an email for the new digital world, where people have multiple devices and multiple social networks to manage. To start with, the interface is so clean you will feel Gmail is some gully in Mumbai. It is certainly a spillover of the design principles of Windows 8 .

Outlook already has Facebook and YouTube integration. Flickr and Twitter will soon be there.  Since about 50 per cent of all mail is in the form of newsletters and promotions, it automatically sorts them into newsletter, social media updates and so on. Click on one and you have the option of deleting all mails from the sender, even scheduling a delete every time you get a mail from the address. Now that is good news. For now you have apps to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and One Note within the mail. There is a catch though. Outlook does not work to its full potential if you are using an old browser.