Microsoft has launched outlook.com recently. The introduction was impressive: built on the strong foundations of Hotmail, learning from the new developments. That they even mentioned GMail as a milestone in the email evolution was really impressive:

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

The layout and the flow was simple and to some extent innovative, and was inline with the Office 2013 design overhaul.

I was delighted, that Microsoft is finally bringing its reins together, and creating an awesome product.

That feeling lasted till I saw this, when I clicked the “Settings” link:

If you have to learn something from GMail, it better be auto saving of drafts. Yes, unlimited storage was introduced with GMail but that was not a feature. Auto saving of drafts was. And a so important one that we have forgotten “Save Draft” button. And stopped typing long mails in a text editor for fear that the browser would close for some reason or the session would timeout.

Hopefully the final version includes auto save (That is if they dont take cue from Gmail and  take forever to come out of beta).