I’ve seen a lot of comments on the blog about people who are having a problem with their Hotmail account. Here’s what to do:

First, try the email support blog. Still having trouble? Submit your problem directly to the support team.

Thanks to all of our users out there for your patience – we’ve spent a number of months making Hotmail faster and more stable. Our latest release we hope will make your experience more snappy – when it comes to web e-mail, if it’s not fast, doesn’t matter how many great features are in it.

These features will be rolling out slowly over the next few weeks, but here’s an early sneak peek at what’s coming.

Speeding up the classic version

The classic version is getting seriously snazzed up – we hear you loud and clear that you like the fast performance of the classic version, but love how the full version allows you to move between messages without reloading the web page. We’re taking a big step in this release towards putting your favorite full version features into the classic version.

Here in the Hotmail office, we’re huge fans of the classic version because everything just works quickly with no wait!

You can check out how snappy the classic version is when you try the following things:

• Read messages in your inbox
• Delete and move messages
• Read messages in different folders
• Check for new messages by clicking on your inbox or other folder

The classic version works the same, and looks the same, but now it is more like the full version, updating what you see on the screen without reloading the whole page.

In future releases, you’ll see more about how we’re making the classic version faster and also adding features to it.

The classic version works for a huge range of browsers: Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 2.0+, Safari 2.0+, and other modern browsers.

Pulling in messages from other accounts

If you’re a paid user, we’re making it easier for you to add a non-Hotmail account! Paid users will see a link in their inbox that says “Add an e-mail account.” If you click that link, we make it easy to pull in messages from your other accounts outside of Hotmail. You can add a POP3 account this way. This feature has been in MSN Hotmail and Windows Live Hotmail for years, but now we’re able to automatically set up many POP3 accounts even if you don’t know your POP server settings.

And as always, the release also contains bug fixes and performance optimizations. Thanks for being a Hotmail customer!

- Ellie Powers, program manager, Windows Live Hotmail