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Microsoft’s i’m Initiative: Hotmail users can now give Microsoft’s money to good causes

Mon, 05 May 2008 19:00:51 GMT

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

Beware of suspicious emails that claim to be from Hotmail

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:05:30 GMT

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?

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

Common types of fake emails:

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.
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.
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.
Any email about Bill Gates wanting to give you money.
Any letter about winning the “Microsoft lottery” (there’s no such thing) or accepting large sums of money from Nigeria or other countries
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.

- Ellie Powers, program manager, Windows Live Hotmail

Happy New Year from Hotmail

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:08:42 GMT

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

Q & A about Windows Live Hotmail

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:16:56 GMT

A few days ago, we told you about how Windows Live Hotmail was created. Today, we’ll respond to some of the top issues we’ve heard about from our customers.

Why did you move me from MSN to Windows Live Hotmail when nothing was wrong?

Unfortunately, MSN Hotmail did not allow us to address significant customer needs, such as support for certain languages and accessibility for folks with different visual and motor disabilities. We also got complaints from many customers about MSN Hotmail being too hard to use. We spent a long time building a new version of Hotmail that the majority of our customers like better, and we want to focus our engineering team’s efforts on the new system. It is a bit of a change, but Windows Live Hotmail has a lot of the same functionality as MSN Hotmail. Before we started working on Windows Live Hotmail, we used to update MSN Hotmail a lot, so it would change, too. If you liked MSN Hotmail, you may prefer the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail. Make sure you’re using it by going to Options (or Options --> More options from the full version). Look at the first option on the page to see if you’re currently using the full or classic version.

Windows Live Hotmail pages take too long to load, especially when I’m using a slow internet connection.

Thanks for reporting this, and this is a high priority for us to fix. If you have a slower Internet connection, you may do better by switching to the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail, which loads about as fast as MSN Hotmail did. The full version is fast once it’s fully loaded, but you do have to download a good chunk of JavaScript at the beginning, and this may be tough for folks who have slow internet connections or live far from our data centers. Make sure you’re using the classic version by going to Options (or Options --> More options from the full version). Look at the first option on the page to see if you’re in the full or classic version.

When I don’t use Internet Explorer, Windows Live Hotmail doesn’t work very well, especially in Safari.

We added support for browsers other than Internet Explorer (IE) in 2005, and the non-IE browser we support best is Firefox 1.5+. It’s available for practically every operating system out there, so if you can’t use IE or don’t like it, try Firefox because it works well with a wide range of websites. We currently do not support the full version for Safari due to technical limitations, though we continue to monitor the issue. Safari users can use the classic version of Hotmail for now, and we are monitoring whether future versions of Safari will support all of our technical needs.

As far as I know, there are only four features that IE supports but Firefox doesn’t. Firefox users get Firefox’s built-in spell check while IE users get a spell check that stores its dictionary on Hotmail’s servers. Firefox users can’t resize the columns in the full version. The special photo upload tool is an ActiveX control and works only in IE, but non-IE users can attach photos just like any other file. Only IE users can see their friends’ Messenger presence.

I don't want an e-mail program that looks like Outlook; the interface of the new Hotmail is too complicated.

The classic version of Windows Live Hotmail looks and acts very similar to MSN Hotmail. If you preferred that simpler interface, make sure you’re using the classic version by going to Options (or Options --> More options from the full version). Look at the first option on the page to see if you’re in the full or classic version.

Why can I do certain stuff in the Full version that I can't do in the Classic version?

The full version uses AJAX, which is a more advanced technology that provides you with a lot of rich and snappy interactions, such as loading the next message in your inbox without reloading the whole page. Some features, such as the reading pane, wouldn’t work well if the whole webpage had to reload, so they are available in the full version only.

I've lost everything in my inbox.

We’re very sad whenever we hear this from a customer, because we know how important your e-mail data is. Our support team has done a lot of investigation into these issues, and nearly every case is due to account expiration.

Free Hotmail accounts expire if you haven’t logged into Hotmail for a certain number of days, which is a standard practice for web-based mail accounts because many users use an account for a little while, and then never use it again. MSN Hotmail accounts expire after 60 days, and Windows Live Hotmail accounts expire after 120 days. Advances in our data center have allowed us to extend our expiration times, which used to be 30 days.

If you believe your e-mail was deleted in error, please contact the Hotmail Support Team directly. We are not able to offer effective support through blogs. You can submit your problem through this web form. There are great, real-life people there who can help you. They are the same folks who bring you the E-mail Support Space.

Thanks for your patience and feedback so far. The best way to give us feedback is not on this blog, it’s via this feedback site.

- Ellie Powers, program manager, Windows Live Hotmail

P.S. This blog entry has also been published on the Windows Live Wire. You’ll find lots more info about Windows Live over there.

Updated 3/7/2008 with new email support link.

Hotmail’s journey from MSN to Windows Live

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:26:50 GMT

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.

Make some plans with the new Windows Live Calendar beta!

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:55:38 GMT

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.

@live.com addresses are here!

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:06:15 GMT

You’ve waited a while, and now they are finally here!!! Be the first to get your very own @live.com address (or @live.* address with your country’s domain). Get the user name of your choice before all of the good ones are gone.

You can always keep the @hotmail.com address you have now, but if you are looking for a new address with a new domain, get one now!

Once you have your new address, you have a few options about what to do with your old account.

Read these tips before you start:

1. http://www.windowslive.com/freshstart.html

a. Click on the “Quick-Switch Guide” for some more instructions.

b. Click “Get your new Windows Live ID now!” to get your address!

Option 1: Link your accounts using Linked IDs.

Linked IDs lets you keep both of your email accounts separate, but it gets easy to switch between accounts when you’re in Hotmail or any other Windows Live web site. You use the drop-down menu in the upper right corner to switch between accounts.

1. Go to Hotmail and login with one of your accounts

2. In the upper right corner, click on your username above the sign out link.

3. Choose “Link other accounts”

4. Re-type your password

5. Click “Link an existing Windows Live ID”

6. Type the username and password for your other address

7. Click “Link”

8. Choose “I accept” to agree to the Windows Live service agreement and Privacy Statement

9. Now your accounts are linked! You can go to the same drop-down menu in the upper right corner to switch between your accounts.

Option 2: Use TrueSwitch to permanently transfer to your new account

If you just want to use your new account and get rid of your old account, let TrueSwitch do all of the work for you. It will transfer your email, contacts, and notify your contacts of your new address. Check out our old blog post for directions.

Option 3: Forward mail from your old address to your new address

If you have an address like example@hotmail.com and then create a new address like example@live.com, you can forward mail from your old address to your new one.

1. Go to Options in Hotmail (full version: Options – More options in the full version).

2. Then go to “Manage your account”

3. Click on “Forward mail to another e-mail account”

No matter which option you choose, you’ll get to use your new @live.com address to access all of our new Windows Live services.

Enjoy your shiny new addresses!

- Ellie Powers, program manager

Hotmail now offers POP Access for Hotmail Plus users

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:46:27 GMT

I got my first real email account my freshman year in college (I had an AOL account before that, which technically was an email account, but only later). Back then the unix email program PINE was state of the art and was the de-facto mail client at most universities. Growing up a Mac user I had never seen a command prompt in my life, but nevertheless, I learned how to use enough of the unix command shell to get my email via the text based reader PINE.

During my freshman year (1994) the only way to read email was to go to the computer lab. I had a laptop, but it wasn't able to get my email cause there were no Wifi or Ethernet networks to use, and my school didn't have dial-up accounts (matter of fact, my school used Token Ring networking). However, email was cool enough that I went to the lab all the time and did what anyone does with email when they first use it…. Send around jokes.

Fast forward a year and I discovered the magic of POP. POP stands for Post Office Protocol and it's a way for an email client to connect to an email server and download your email to your laptop or desktop computer. The first time I used an email client (Claris Emailer) to connect to my university email account using POP I felt liberated. No more unix command line or tiny screen to read emails. I could have a rich experience composing, replying, copying, pasting and dragging messages to folders. How cool! Having been a Mac user it just seemed natural to use a GUI to manage my email.

Since then my appetite has grown beyond POP. I have lots of folders and use lots of computers to access my email, and frankly, I've been spoiled by my Microsoft Exchange account for years. However, we have realized that even though we provide rich synchronization of your email and folders with Outlook (via Outlook Connector) and Windows Live Mail lots of people still want and demand POP.

Well, it's been a dirty little secret that Hotmail has always maintained a POP service for a small segment of customers. It's always been very limited, and we didn't want to encourage or offer it to more customers because we've always had ambitions for providing for a scalable and cost effective protocol (which POP is not in the world of huge inboxes). Well we now have this protocol, it's called DeltaSync, and it's something that Outlook and Windows Live Mail use. What we didn't want to do is offer POP access and then have Outlook and Windows Live Mail customers use POP over DeltaSync. Now that we have free offline mail access we have focused our energies on offering users who use clients like Eudora, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail the ability to get their Hotmail in those clients. Additionally, most all mobile devices today support POP (including the Apple iPhone) and to date we haven't been able to offer folks with a data plan a rich way to get their email unless they are using Windows Mobile (and even that is limited depending on carrier).

The story of POP continues like this… A few months ago some folks on the team hatched a plan to finally offer POP and starting this week Hotmail Plus users ($19.95 a year) will be able to use POP access from any device. In the interest of transparency though I want to be clear that we have plans to offer POP to all users (all premium and free) but we aren't ready to do that yet. I can't comment on a timeframe for when free users will get POP, but we hope to do so within the next 12 months.

If you do take advantage of this premium feature and sign up for Hotmail plus you'll also get an ad-free experience, more storage, larger attachment support, and a non expiring account.

Our POP service requires that you use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) with the POP and SMTP connection and use SMTP authentication. This is to ensure that your email address and password are not subject to tampering. The settings are the following:

POP: pop3.live.com (port 995)
SMTP: smtp.live.com (port 25)
- Note: make sure you check the box that indicates that your outgoing server requires authentication (in most mail clients this is not checked by default).
Username: your full email address
Password: your Windows Live ID password

Well I hope this news is welcome, and thanks for being patient!

-Omar Shahine (Lead Program Manager, Hotmail)

PS - please note that I said Hotmail Plus users and not MSN Premium users. We are working to offer everyone POP access eventually, but for now, Hotmail Plus users are the only ones that can do so.

Go on a vacation, and lose your window office?

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:33:01 GMT

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

Disable Firefox Adblock for Hotmail or switch to the classic version

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 18:50:40 GMT

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:

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.”
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

Announcing TrueSwitch – an easy and painless way to switch your e-mail account to Hotmail

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 22:07:54 GMT

We’ve listened to our customers who told us that switching e-mail accounts isn’t easy. Say you’ve recently opened a new account with Windows Live Hotmail. Chances are you’ve got a ton of contacts and old e-mails sitting in another account that you wish you could easily move over. You also want to give your contacts a shout to let them know that they should reach you at your new Hotmail address. All this sounds like a bunch of work.

Well, we’ve got good news. With TrueSwitch, you can now do all of these time-consuming tasks with just a few easy clicks.

1. Copy your e-mail history

2. Copy your address book

3. Notify contacts of your e-mail address

All you need is a Windows Live Hotmail account. Please try TrueSwitch and let us know what you think. You can even use this for Hotmail to Hotmail account transfers as well as the upcoming live.com accounts when they become available. I used it to consolidate my accounts – it’s great to see all my e-mail and contacts in one place now! The TrueSwitch service is now live in the US, with more countries to follow in the next couple of months.

-Grace Wardhana, Senior Product Manager

Outlook Connector’s final bits are available (and free!)

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 01:03:43 GMT

We blogged earlier about the beta version of the Outlook Connector. Now the Outlook Connector is out of beta!

If you download the new Outlook Connector, you get free access to your Hotmail and Contacts. (Paid users also get free access to their Calendar.)

You can download the final (non-beta) version of the Outlook Connector here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7aad7e6a-931e-438a-950c-5e9ea66322d4&DisplayLang=en

As a note, the Hotmail team does not work on the Outlook Connector, so you should go to their blog to learn more about that team: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/

By the way, thanks for all of the feedback so far about the latest Hotmail release. You may notice that some of the features you asked for on this blog are now live in our product. We will continue to use your feedback If you need help with your Hotmail account, please go to the Hotmail Support blog here: http://emailsupport.spaces.live.com/

- Ellie Powers-Boyle, program manager

August: Hotmail will soon bring you more of your requests, better performance

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:37:52 GMT

We went out of beta in May, and we’re already releasing something new. Today, these new features will begin to roll our gradually to all our customers over the next few weeks, so if you don’t immediately see them, be patient, they’re coming!

It’s a fun time to be working on Hotmail. We already did a ton of work to get the basics ready to get out of beta, so now we’ve been able to add some more of the extras that our more advanced users have been asking for. We’re continuing to collect feedback and using it to guide which areas of the product to improve next. Thanks to all of you who were beta testers, have clicked the “feedback” link in Hotmail, or leave constructive comments on the blog. We’re listening!

Performance: We’ve been hearing you loud and clear across the world: speed is one of the most important aspects of a web-based email service. We’ve spent more time in this release identifying what parts of the product are slowest and fixing those. We hope that you notice an improvement when this update is released to your account, and we’ll continue our work on performance in future releases.

Quality of Service: Our last release went quite smoothly, and we’ve been continuing to monitor the live site to make sure that we’re providing e-mail that is reliable – you always want to be able to get to your mail, and we hear you!

More storage! Just when you were wondering how you’d ever fill up 2 or 4 GB of mail, we’ve given you more storage. Free users will get 5 GB and Hotmail Plus users will get 10 GB of Hotmail storage.

Mail retention changes: We’ll be increasing the amount of time that we leave messages in your junk and deleted items folders over the next few months.

Contacts de-duplication: Do you have five different entries for the same person in your Contacts? Yeah, me too, but not anymore. We’re the first webmail service to roll out “contacts de-duplication”. If you get a message from “Steve Kafka” and click “add contact” but there’s already a Steve Kafka, we’ll let you know and let you add Steve’s other e-mail address to your existing “Steve Kafka” contact entry. We’re just trying to be smarter to make your life easier and faster. There’s also a wizard you can run to clean up your existing duplicate contacts.

Show content more easily: Hotmail blocks images and links in messages from unknown senders for your protection from spammers and phishing scams. Now you can click directly on the gray square or link to decide if you want to show content in a message. (It’s still not a good idea to show content, especially images, in messages from spammers. Just loading the images in a spam lets them know that you’re reading their e-mails.)

Spam-fighting: We’ve made it possible to report phishing attacks like those fake bank notices or fraudsters who want your checking account number so they can supposedly make a deposit. Just click “report phishing” if you think you’ve found a dangerous scam. In the junk folder, click “not junk” to help train our filters. Every mail you report does help make our spam filter smarter, but fighting spam takes constant vigilance. Spammers always find a new trick whenever we thwart their old tricks.

Right-to-left languages: Support for Hebrew and Arabic is now out of beta! If you speak these languages or want to see Hotmail in a totally new way, go to Options and change your language. We fixed a lot of bugs for users of Hebrew and Arabic, so we hope the whole UI works better for you now.

More space for your email, a.k.a. smaller header: We heard you asking for more space for your mail, so we shrunk the header in this update.

Forwarding messages: You can now forward mail from your Hotmail account to other accounts. For now, if you have a free account, you can only forward your mail to other Hotmail accounts. (Paid accounts get more choices.) This is great idea if you have a few different addresses and want to consolidate your mail.

Cobranding: This is what we call showing the logo of an organization for whom we are hosting email. Hotmail is currently hosting e-mail for universities (and a few ISPs) around the world, so we show their logos in Hotmail.

Accepting meeting requests: If you receive a meeting request, such as one sent from Outlook, you can now click “accept” and have it added to your Calendar. This had existed for years in MSN Hotmail, and we’re adding it to Windows Live Hotmail now.

Vacation replies: Now Hotmail can automatically tell your friends why you haven’t written them back in a few weeks.

Classic version jump to page: In the classic version, we’ve made it easier to jump to different pages of mail. This will be very handy as you grow into your new 5 GB or 10 GB account.

And finally... Drumroll please… we know this is going to be a big hit with a lot of you out there in blog land. I hope you remember this as the Hotmail team listening to what you want. :-)

You can turn off the Today page (if you want to). If you’d rather see your inbox immediately upon login, you have the option to turn off the page of MSN news (called the Today page). The choice is yours. :-)

- Ellie Powers-Boyle, program manager

Hotmail test lead rolls with the hot

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:46:55 GMT

John Rodrigues, one of the test leads for Windows Live Hotmail, loves to race cars on dirt tracks when he’s not busy making sure that the product meets high standards of quality. Last weekend, he and a member of our operations team went for a spin out in the dust. His blue car was sporting the “I roll with the hot” sticker that he won in a team trivia contest.

The rest of the team is busy in Mountain View, CA working on the next version of Windows Live Hotmail and ensuring a smooth transition from MSN Hotmail to Windows Live Hotmail for all of our users. We hope you’re enjoying Windows Live Hotmail so far.

- Ellie Powers-Boyle, program manager

Access Windows Live Hotmail for free using the Outlook Connector beta

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:07:44 GMT

Update 2: Another how-to article here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102218231033.aspx

Update: New download link!

Here is the third book in the Windows Live e-mail trilogy: the new beta version of the Outlook Connector!

If you have Outlook on your computer, you can download and install the new Outlook Connector beta here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7aad7e6a-931e-438a-950c-5e9ea66322d4&displaylang=en&Hash=h6s3dqw89xeBTpexcStnoW2i81qoP%2fsPxtE2wOjLxQJBvn4S74p5AsZCAG2yP5bLTnQvU6m2ivmwN3459c5fMw%3d%3d

More ways to check your mail (and contacts, and maybe even Calendar): To access your Hotmail account, you have options: the web interface available at www.hotmail.com or http://mail.live.com, the free downloadable Windows Live Mail (our new free consumer client), and now… the latest beta version of the Outlook Connector – now available for free users.

Why all the choice, you ask? Well, we know that one size doesn’t fit all with our Hotmail customers. We want them to have the best e-mail experience possible with us, and many people love the power of Outlook. Giving free access in Outlook is one of the things we’re doing to make Hotmail easier to use and more accessible to people in the way they prefer: on the web, desktop clients, and even mobile phones.

If you’re a free Hotmail user, you can access your e-mail, folders and contacts using the Outlook Connector. If you’re a subscriber to MSN Premium, you get all of that goodness plus access to your Windows Live Calendar.

I am very, very personally excited about this beta launch because I briefly worked on the calendar sharing feature back in 2003 before I joined the Hotmail team in 2004. If you’re a paid user, you can see your Windows Live Calendar in Outlook and share it with your friends and family, and think of me. I hope it works well for you!

Why is the Outlook Connector useful? The Outlook Connector gives you more power than POP. It shows your folder structure, keeps track of read and unread messages, and shows you your contacts (and calendar for paid users). If you’re already using Outlook, particularly with multiple e-mail accounts, the Outlook Connector is a great way to manage your accounts together with powerful tools. Even if you install the Outlook Connector, you’ll still be able to use the web or mobile interfaces to get to your mail while you’re on the go.

The Hotmail team didn’t actually build the Outlook Connector, so if you have questions about it, please direct them to the Outlook Connector team.

- Ellie Powers-Boyle, program manager

New beta software to access your Hotmail offline

Wed, 30 May 2007 23:02:08 GMT

When we launched Windows Live Hotmail earlier this month, we mentioned that there would be more ways to get your e-mail coming from Microsoft. The new beta for client-based e-mail is here! The Windows Live Hotmail team would like to invite you to try a new and exciting way of accessing your Hotmail account and any other e-mail accounts.

It's called Windows Live Mail and it's free software that you install on your computer.

Windows Live Mail has everything you've loved in our existing free e-mail clients and is the successor to Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Windows Live Mail desktop.

What's cool? There's a lot of stuff to try, but if you love your Hotmail account, you'll also like:

It works for free with Hotmail
You can access your Hotmail e-mail, folders, and contacts even when you're offline. If you make any changes, they'll get synced up again when you reconnect to the internet.
You can aggregate multiple Hotmail accounts at the same time in one view
With your Hotmail account, you can try lots of powerful and interactive features. My favorite is photo sharing.

Read the Windows Live Mail team's blog here: http://morethanmail.spaces.live.com/

Download Windows Live Mail here: http://get.live.com/betas/maildesktop_betas

To summarize:

Windows Live Hotmail: web-based e-mail anywhere you are
Windows Live Mail: free client software you install to use with Hotmail and any other e-mail account

- Ellie Powers-Boyle, program manager

Very Cool Windows Live Hotmail Launch Videos

Wed, 09 May 2007 01:07:41 GMT

Hot off the press! We've just released a set of Windows Live Hotmail launch videos that are pretty hilarious. I think my favorites are the "Suspicious Male" video, which was so subtle that I missed it the first few times I saw it, and the "Preview Pane" video.

You can find them at www.newlivehotmail.com/. Enjoy!

- Richard Sim, Senior Product Manager