What's new in Hotmail

Microsoft SmartScreen

Our success in fighting spam is primarily due to the use of Microsoft SmartScreen — the anti-spam technology used also in Microsoft Forefront, Exchange, and (for anti-phishing) Windows Internet Explorer 8. SmartScreen distinguishes between legitimate email messages and spam based on IP reputations, user reporting, third-party sources, semantics, botnet detection, signature recognition, and more.

Individual preference auto-learning

In some cases, what's junk mail to one person is legitimate mail to someone else and vice versa. So we've innovated and invested in learning about that on the fly based on the individual.

False-positive reduction

Very often (nine times out of 10) when people approach us with a concern that we're blocking legitimate mail (blocking mail from someone they do want to hear from) it's because they've accidently placed that person on their block list. This situation is something the new Hotmail will also help remedy behind the scenes by a more nuanced interpretation of user actions.

Junk mail descriptors

The new Hotmail tags junk mail so that when you find a message in your junk mail folder, you know how it ended up there and can subsequently take action to keep it from happening to similar messages in the future.

Spammer infrastructure detection

The new Hotmail makes life more expensive for spammers by combating spammer infrastructure head on — detecting and destroying spammer nests — compelling them to spend the money to build new ones elsewhere. Less money in the game, fewer spammers.

Time traveling filters

Through the new Hotmail, we're fine-tuning our innovative ability to retroactively remove spam in real time as we discern the signatures of a new spam effort.

OK…we've successfully minimized the spam, now let's tackle the junk mail — helping you to manage and get rid of the clutter in your inbox.

Hotmail highlights

Immediately see if you have new email from friends, social network updates, shipments, appointments and birthday reminders — all in a single glance when you log in.

One-click filters

With a single click, conveniently filter your entire inbox to show only those messages that are from contacts or from social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn, etc. No setup required.

Quick views

Quickly see all email containing photos across your entire account — including those stored in your inbox, folders, and POP-aggregated email accounts — with one click. Or see all your documents. Or photos. Or shipping updates. Or messages you've flagged. The new Hotmail gives you complete freedom to choose what you want to see with the convenience of a single click.

Inbox search auto-complete

When you type a single letter in the search box, Hotmail's advanced-made-easy search suggests a variety of helpful searches — from basic to complex — that Hotmail will then conduct automatically. No need to fill out an advanced search form (although we have an advanced search form you can use if you'd prefer — giving you the flexibility to search the way you want).

Conversation view

We know how having a "conversation" with someone — or several people — via email over an extended period can leave pieces of that conversation haphazardly spread throughout the inbox in individual snippets. The new Hotmail brings all those snippets together so you can view the entire conversation in one place. (Note: Conversation view is an option that you can turn on or off because not everyone prefers to view their email in conversation view. This is flexibility that Gmail does not offer — Gmail has conversation threading permanently on — no way to turn it off, which many people told us they prefer.)

Sweep

Finally a tool that makes it super easy to get rid of the junk mail cluttering up your inbox — the No. 1 email annoyance — at least according to the thousands of people we've asked. Sweep is a virtual broom that lets you super easily "sweep" the mail you don't want out of your inbox into either folders or oblivion, leaving your inbox clean. We'n ll even offer to auto-sweep email you don't want or want archived in the future if you'd like. Just leave the box checked when we offer to do that for you. No need to set up and manage rules (unless you'd prefer to do that).

Exchange instant messages and text messaging (SMS) with your Windows Live Messenger friends

With the new Hotmail, you can see who's online and chat with your Messenger friends or even send an SMS message to their phone — all without ever leaving your inbox.

Send up to 10 GB of photos per message

Send virtually all the photos you want to without having to worry about attachment limits or clogged inboxes, either at your end or on the recipient's end. Hotmail works with Windows Live SkyDrive, your free online storage space from Windows Live, so you can send up to 200 photos of up to 50 MB each (10 GB total) in a single message. It's as easy as sending regular attachments, but we give you the option of uploading them to SkyDrive. This means the people you're sending photos to get an email containing a preview of the photos, along with links to launch a slide show or download the photos to their hard drives — all in a single .zip file instead of painstakingly downloading them individually. Or they can even import them straight into Windows Live Photo Gallery. Sharing lots of large photo attachments has never been more easy or painless.

Active views

Thanks to our new partner platform, the new Hotmail saves you the inconvenience of having to hop from your inbox to different websites by integrating their content and functionality directly into the email you receive. For example, if your friend sends you a link to a video or photo album you can now view it from right within the email message itself. Hotmail supports this for links to many sites like YouTube, Hulu, Flickr, SmugMug and Justin.tv. If you buy something online and receive a package tracking code in email, Hotmail displays the real time shipping status so you don't have to look it up on the shipper's website. Hotmail is also partnering with other companies and services like LinkedIn to provide an interactive experience, letting you take actions inside the email they send — getting more done with email than ever before.

Single contact list

The new Hotmail brings all your online contacts into one convenient place — even those from services like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Send an email to anyone, and if you want to you can manage your contacts by creating categories such as Friends or Co-workers to easily organize your address book.

Exchange ActiveSync

Hotmail supports push email on the web, PC and now on mobile phones. Using Exchange ActiveSync, available on nearly 300 million phones, with the new Hotmail you can not only seamlessly synchronize email between your phone and the web, but also synchronize your calendar and contacts. This is a significant improvement over IMAP alternatives that support sync'ing of email only (not calendar and contacts).

Rich mobile browse: mail, contacts and calendar

Many consumers who use mobile phones as their primary way to access email and the internet — and even those who do most of their email on the PC — demand a robust email experience from just about anywhere. With the new Hotmail, the mobile experience is optimized for rich browsers and touch, so that your experience feels seamless on the latest phones. The inbox supports filters, previews and quick views of your email, offline email viewing mode, conversation threading, the ability to flag messages, message header details on/off, and more. The rich content features enable you to view HTML and view or forward attachments. When writing an email, rich composition helps auto-complete the names you begin to type. And rich management lets you set an away message, manage junk mail filters and block lists, manage nested folders, and set email forwarding rules. A light version of mobile browse will continue to be available for feature phone browsers (phones that aren't smartphones).

Mobile calendar

Manage invitations received via Hotmail, set reminders, aggregate multiple calendars, share your calendar with friends and family, and do it all from the calendar built into your phone with ActiveSync or your phone's browser. If you use Windows Live Calendar, you can use ActiveSync to view your schedule from the built-in calendar on your phone, and any changes or additions to it will be automatically synced with the version on the web and your PC. If your phone doesn't support ActiveSync, or if you simply prefer a different experience, you can access Windows Live Calendar anywhere using your phone's browser. It has a robust set of features that allows you to view upcoming events, see free/busy times, and quickly add events. You can easily look at your schedule by day, week or month, view events across multiple calendars, get previews of event details, set reminders for your events on the go, and manage events across time zones.

Hotmail mobile apps

A number of our partners also built custom Hotmail apps for other mobile phones. This includes Blackberry, Nokia and many other phones. You can either download this software or get it pre-installed by the phone manufacturer. In total, over 1,400 mobile device models run Windows Live services, supported by more than 140 operators worldwide.

Anywhere access

The moment you receive an Office document as an attachment in Hotmail, Word, Excel or PowerPoint, you can open and view the attachment online in any popular browser — on a PC or Mac — and even if Office is not installed (or if you have an old version.) This results from the seamless integration between Hotmail and the Office Web Apps, as you'll also see further in the following examples.

Highest fidelity viewing

Rich from your browser, you can view Office documents (sent to you in Hotmail) with the same fidelity you'd get if you were viewing them using one of the Office applications on your PC. This means that if you're travelling and want to be able to view that PowerPoint presentation or you're on the road and want to read that Word document, you now get 100 percent full viewing quality even when you're away from your PC.

Edit Office documents in your browser (with the Office Web Apps) or using Office on your PC — or both

If you need to perform intensive editing tasks, you can go from editing the document in your browser with the Office Web Apps to editing it in an Office application on your PC. When you're finished, any edits you made to the document on the browser will maintain formatting and any on your PC will be automatically saved back into the cloud where you can then keep the document stored privately or share it with others.

Reply with edits to an attachment

Normally, if a friend emailed you a document — like a resume — and asked you to make a few edits, you'd have to spend time downloading, saving, opening, resaving and re-attaching the document. And of course, you would need to make sure your PC had Office installed. The new Hotmail makes this much easier by letting you edit your friend's document and reply back — all without leaving Hotmail.

Share big attachments

Just as they can with photos, Hotmail users can send up to 200 Office documents of up to 50 MB each — a total of 10 GB — in a single message. The people you send the documents to — regardless of whether they're on Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or otherwise — will receive links to where you've stored the documents in the cloud (on Windows Live SkyDrive) so that you're not filling their inboxes. They can click on the links to view the documents in their browsers using the Office Web Apps or download the documents to their local machines — one by one or all together in a single convenient .zip file. And when you send those documents, just like with photos, we create a private folder and only the people that receive the email will have access.

Work with others

Even those friends not on Hotmail. If you're using the new Hotmail, you can email Office documents to people on other email services (including Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) and they too can view and edit your Office documents in the cloud. Nothing is needed to view, and all they need is a Windows Live ID to edit.

Versioning

And with multiple edited versions of the same document, you can always go back to previous versions thanks to the online file management provided by Windows Live SkyDrive — another key part of transforming Hotmail and Office into a great personal productivity solution.

SkyDrive Integration

Windows Live SkyDrive is an online storage and sharing service, providing you with 25 GB of free storage for documents, photos and other files. Hotmail works with SkyDrive so that you can send larger attachments without clogging your recipients' inboxes. When you click "Office docs" or "Photos" in the Hotmail insert bar, your files are uploaded to SkyDrive, and your recipients will receive a link where they can access the files online, saving space in their inboxes. Also, when you send a document via Hotmail and store it on SkyDrive, recipients don't need the latest version of Office installed to view a high-quality preview or even make edits to your documents.

Account security information

The new Hotmail encourages you to increase the security of your account by adding security information — information you can privately associate with your Hotmail account. This information can help you recover access to and control over an account that someone has taken from you, a risk confronting all public webmail services since hijacking scams aren't technology-dependent. To date, Hotmail has enabled you to add two different kinds of information to regain control of your account if you've forgotten your password or if someone has stolen your account: an alternate email address and a secret question-secret answer combination (e.g., "What was the name of your first pet?"). The new security platform elements we've built up around Hotmail now enable you to use your cell phone or other items as proof of account ownership. For example, if you lose your password or, worse, if your account gets compromised, we can now send you an account recapture code via an SMS message or enable you to regain access to your account.

Single-use codes

This new security feature is designed to further protect you when you sign in from public computers, such as those found in internet cafes, airports and coffee shops. By using a single-use code, you won't have to type your password into a public computer, thereby preventing it from being stolen by key-loggers and the like. You simply click "request a code", and a one-time use authentication code will be sent to a private proof point you've set up — an alternate email or mobile phone. You can opt to use the one-time code, instead of your password, to access your account on a public machine.

Full-session SSL

In addition to providing SSL encryption at login for all accounts, the new Hotmail will soon support the option to maintain SSL encryption between you and our servers during your entire Hotmail session.

Trusted senders

With the new Hotmail, we help you to visually identify trusted senders in your inbox, particularly banks and the like, which are commonly used for phishing scams. We put safety logos next to those senders that we recognize as legitimate, not those who are malicious pretenders.