Your mail is here, come and get it!

You may have noticed some of your Messenger buddies with a little “i’m” icon next to their name in your buddy list. If you do, you’ll know that your friend is participating in the i’m Initiative and raising money for social causes. Here on the Hotmail team, most of our office signed up right away when the i’m Initiative launched in 2007 – we use Messenger so much to communicate at work that we figured we should put all of that typing to good use. Now, we’re going to have to sign up all of our Hotmail accounts!

What is the i’m Initiative?

The i’m Initiative is a Microsoft  program where Microsoft shares a portion of their advertising revenue for everyday activities – sending IMs and emails. Hotmail and Messenger have ads, like all free web services, and Microsoft makes money when a customer sees an ad. The i’m Initiative has successfully raised over 1.4 million dollars since it got started in 2007. It used to be available only in Windows Live Messenger, and now the Hotmail team is glad to say that you’ll be able to raise money for the cause of your choice each time you send an email.

How do I get started?

Go to http://im.live.com to join. You can choose to participate in Messenger, Hotmail, or both and you can pick a different organization for each service or dedicate all your efforts to one cause – it’s entirely up to you! This program is currently available only to customers in the United States. Once you’re set up, you’ll raise money for your favorite cause every time you send an email or IM. It’s really easy. Once you join, there’s no extra time out of your day, you don’t have to pay any money, and you get to know that you’re taking a step towards making the world better. The power of the collective can be huge – think of the difference that could happen if everyone swapped out a few plastic grocery bags each week for a reusable bag or took one less car trip a week.

Can I choose who gets Microsoft’s money?

You can choose to support any of the organizations on this list: the American Red Cross, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the National AIDS Fund, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, ninemillion.org, Sierra Club, StopGlobalWarming.org, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, The Humane Society of the United States and U.S Fund for UNICEF.

- Ellie Powers, program manager, Windows Live Hotmail

For many years, scammers out on the internet have sent e-mails that claim to be from Hotmail but are actually fake and some are even dangerous. You’ve probably gotten similar emails pretending to be a legitimate bank or other business.

As with any other scam, the saying that fits is: If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is.

What do I do if I received a fraudulent email pretending to be from Hotmail?

1. Do NOT click “show images” or other content in the email
2. Do NOT click any links in the email. Approach links in email with caution.
3. Click the “Junk” button in Hotmail (or “Report phishing scam”)

Common types of fake emails:

1. An email telling you that you must go and enter your username and password to verify your account. Check the “from” address of any such email.
2. If it’s not coming from an official @live.com, @hotmail.com or @microsoft.msn.com address or has a phishing or other safety warning, it’s probably a scam. Occasionally, Microsoft does hire a third-party marketing company to send out emails, but the emails should notify you that this is happening. Sometimes users will set up @hotmail.com accounts for fraudulent purposes, including impersonating Microsoft. Report fraudulent email messages that use the Microsoft name and logo.
3. Any email that says that you must forward it to other people in order to not lose your Hotmail account or have something else bad happen to you.
4. Any email about Bill Gates wanting to give you money.
5. Any letter about winning the “Microsoft lottery” (there’s no such thing) or accepting large sums of money from Nigeria or other countries
6. Any email saying that Microsoft is going to get rid of free Hotmail accounts. While Microsoft has offered paid Hotmail accounts since 2001, we have always had free email accounts and plan to keep free email accounts around forever.

See also Support blog’s report on fraudulent email.

- Ellie Powers, program manager, Windows Live Hotmail

Happy New Year from all of us here on the Windows Live Hotmail team! I hope all of you out there in blog land have a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year. We’re back in the office and busy working on our plans for Hotmail in 2008.

Thanks to our many users out there who have celebrated many milestones with us! On January 1, 2007, we were still in beta. On January 1, 2006, we were just releasing the beta to countries outside of the United States and United Kingdom. On January 1, 2005, we didn’t have public beta users and we didn’t have this blog.

By this time next year, we want Windows Live Hotmail to go even farther in helping you connect with your family and friends and managing information in today’s busy world.

- Ellie Powers, program manager

A lot of you have comments and questions about how and why we decided to make all the changes that we did in going from MSN Hotmail to Windows Live Hotmail, so I thought I’d provide a little background for you.

The Hotmail team started working on Windows Live Hotmail back in 2004, with the goal of making web-based e-mail easier, faster, and safer. Our MSN Hotmail code base was also getting pretty rickety, so we wanted to start over from scratch to create a new code base that would be easier to maintain and develop on. When we started thinking about what belongs in the new Hotmail, we focused on the most core features of e-mail and analyzed how e-mail fits into the lives of our hundreds of millions of customers around the world.

It’s not possible to build something perfect the first time (or maybe not even the 10^th time) so we decided to start gathering user feedback early. We launched our public beta in the spring/summer of 2005. Customer feedback was such a high priority for us that we started our public beta when we still hadn’t added all of the features we knew we’d need.

Some of you out there in blogland are the beta testers who devoted so much of your time and energy to trying new releases and submitting feedback. With each release, we identified the biggest problems by looking at customer feedback and surveys from the previous release, fixed bugs and designed new features to address the top issues, then used usability studies to tweak our initial designs. What comes next? Yup, more beta testing and another survey to see how much better the new release was compared to the old one. You can read all about Hotmail’s adventures in betaland on our team blog, http://mailcall.spaces.live.com.

We did these iterations for about two years, until May 2007, when our data showed that Windows Live Hotmail was good enough to get out of beta. We did another release in the fall of 2007 that we have been moving our MSN Hotmail users to. We are eternally grateful to everyone who has taken the time to give constructive feedback. You have influenced what we built and which order we built the parts in. Windows Live Hotmail in 2007 is so much better than it was two years ago. And we are not done yet! Hotmail will continue to evolve for years to come – we have some really cool ideas for the next year that we’re just starting to plan.

With that said, Windows Live Hotmail is not perfect, and we are still planning to make changes. Change can be hard, especially when it’s not a change that you, personally, may have asked for. We did get feedback from thousands of customers, but with hundreds of millions of customers out there, it’s tough to make something that makes everyone happy.

In a few days, we’ll follow up with answers to some of the most common questions we’ve heard from our customers about Windows Live Hotmail.

You can post a comment on this blog if you like, but the best way to give us feedback is on this feedback site.

- Ellie Powers, program manager, Windows Live Hotmail

P.S. This blog entry will also be published on Windows Live Wire.

In the past few years, we’ve been investing heavily in building the best web e-mail offering. But part of the team has also been intently focused on delivering the next-generation web calendar: Windows Live Calendar.  It’s been a long time coming and we’ve been pretty hush-hush about it. Today, we’re finally ready to invite the world to try the new Windows Live Calendar beta!

From the get-go, we know that we want to build a calendaring tool that is slick, fast and effortless to use. Keeping track of schedules is no easy task. We all prefer to spend more time living life (or coding if you’re like most of our developers) than organizing life with an overly complicated tool.  So let me give you a quick tour of what I love most about Windows Live Calendar.

Effortlessly make your plans

Using AJAX technology, we’ve made it easy for you to get in and out of your calendar quickly.

·         In a rush? Simply click a time anywhere in the week and add an event.

·         Forgot where your next class is? Mouse over an event to get more details.

·         A doctor’s appointment got moved? Drag and drop it to the right day.

There are also some nifty features to help you scan through your schedule easily. My personal favorite is that navigating from month to month has never been easier -- you can use your mouse wheel to scroll through until you find the right week.

Stay coordinated with friends and family

If you have a family, you know how difficult it is to coordinate schedules between spouses and kids’ activities. If you’re a student, you know how consuming it is to find time to meet for school projects with your classmates. By sharing schedules on Windows Live Calendar, we take the chore out of coordination.

·         Share as much or as little of your calendar with free/busy, read-only, or read/write permissions.

·         Send friends a view-only secret link to your calendar so they don’t need to sign in with a Windows Live ID.

You can also make your calendar public, so if you’re running a business or an organization that is keen on promoting events, you can make it easy for people to find out what’s going on.

Get reminded

Sometimes we forget our commitments so Windows Live Calendar delivers you reminders through e-mail, Windows Live Messenger, or an SMS message on your mobile phone.  You can also wake up to your upcoming schedule by including an RSS feed of your calendar on your favorite home page like Live.com, or My.MSN.com. Because Windows Live Calendar supports the iCal standard, you can add any ICS-based calendar you find on the Internet so you don’t miss out on your favorite sports games, movie openings or upcoming holidays.  To start, try our holiday calendar list or go to the iCalShare web site.

Worldwide appeal

Finally, this is truly a global calendar built by a truly global team. Our development team spanned Shanghai and Silicon Valley. There were also supporting teams from India, Redmond, Washington, and Ireland.  We made sure you can easily travel the world with Windows Live Calendar. It’s offered in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, China, India, France, Germany, Spain, and Russia, with many more markets to come.  Events can be created in different time zones from your day-to-day time zone. You can even float your events, so no matter where you are in the world you can have lunch at 12 noon.

Speaking of lunch, one strange tidbit about the Windows Live Calendar team is that every Wednesday, we all “recharge” with a tasty bowl of Japanese udon. So after ~600 bowls of udon, ~600 pairs of chopsticks and lots of hard work, we hope you and your friends will give Windows Live Calendar a spin. Because it’s our initial beta release, there’s going to be many more features coming soon so please send us feedback and tell us what improvements you’d like to see!

Denise Ho

Lead Program Manager – Windows Live Calendar

P.S. Windows Live Calendar is actually a brand new service, totally separate from MSN Calendar. During the beta period, the existing MSN Calendar you’re used to seeing in Hotmail will continue to service all current users who don’t want to try the new beta. To sign up for the new beta, simply go to http://calendar.live.com, sign in, and say yes when asked if you want to start using the beta. Your old calendar data won’t be transferred over to your Windows Live Calendar, but it’ll be waiting for you if you choose to opt out of the beta.

Fearless leader Mike Schackwitz (“Schack”) made the “mistake” of going on a well-earned one-day vacation. He came back and discovered that his new corner office had its windows replaced with high-quality sheet rock. The modifications were made by none other than the loving members of the program management and QA teams. (Hire them to fix your house or for any of your office prank needs?)

The prank has taken on a life of its own, and the team is now using it to support more worthwhile building efforts, namely Habitat for Humanity. We’re taking informal pledges on the web site (you can pledge dollars for each day Schack keeps the drywall up) and then we’ll encourage participants to make their donations directly to Habitat for Humanity.

Microsoft has a strong history of corporate and employee charitable giving, and sometimes it comes out in goofy ways.

Check out the whole story and pledge (if you like).

Enjoy!

- Hotmail Construction Crew, serving all of your office prank needs since 2007 

We’ve had some reports on the blog, and our QA team has confirmed that having the Firefox Adblock add-on enabled for the Hotmail site can make it impossible to compose or reply to a message in the full version. This does not affect Internet Explorer users or Firefox users who do not have the Adblock add-on. Depending on which Adblock filters you’ve created, you may or may not be affected.

The Hotmail team does cross-browser testing, including full Firefox testing – it’s important to us that you can get to your e-mail from anywhere. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to test every browser add-on, so sometimes things break, and thanks for your prompt reports of this problem!

While we do not condone suppression of advertising in our product (advertising does fund our product) we realize that users who have enabled this add-on may not understand why Hotmail stopped working.

We’re working how to mitigate this problem in a future release. In the meantime, if you’re having problems composing or replying in Firefox, you have two options:

1. Disable Adblock for Hotmail. You could also try tweaking your filters, but the foolproof method is to go to Tools --> Adblock --> and select “Whitelist this whole site.”
2. Switch to the classic version. This means clicking the “Switch to classic” link that you see in the lower left corner.

- Ellie Powers-Boyle, program manager