One of the wonderful and difficult things about building software for hundreds of millions of customers is that any change you make is an opportunity to either delight or annoy your customers. Sometimes you do both.
Over the past several years, we’ve received a lot of negative feedback on the old user tile login experience, from bugs to design flaws to the fact that it only worked only in IE.
One way we are evolving Hotmail is to help you do more with your email right from the inbox. Another way is to bring the features you expect from traditional desktop mail experiences into Hotmail. With Internet Explorer 9, we can now tailor Hotmail and deliver application-like experiences on Windows 7.
Today, Facebook chat is available to Hotmail customers worldwide, wherever Facebook is available.
When we first announced the ability to chat with Facebook friends from Hotmail, we were only able to offer this to customers in six regions. Since then, we’ve been working with Facebook to increase availability, and a few weeks ago, we announced that the feature was available globally through Messenger.
Starting today, you can create and manage multiple email aliases from a single Hotmail account. Together with features that we introduced in November that let you use Hotmail with any existing email address, the new aliasing feature makes it easy to use a different email address and still get all the benefits of Hotmail without having to change your primary email address and online identity.
On December 31, 2010, a number of our users reported their email messages and folders were missing from their Hotmail accounts. I want to take a little time to explain what happened, and what steps we’ve taken to fix this problem and prevent it from happening in the future.
Starting today, Hotmail and select partners are introducing a new type of interactive and dynamic email that runs on the Hotmail Active Views platform.
Beginning in the late 90s, email services evolved from supporting just plain text and attachments to supporting rich, HTML-based email. This was a big development, and it ushered in an era of structured email templates and embedded photos and links. Today, nearly all messages sent by businesses and websites use HTML.
Beginning today, Hotmail is providing you with the option to enhance the security of your entire Hotmail session with HTTPS data encryption (via secure socket layers, or SSL), which is currently used to help secure your Hotmail sign-in. Today’s update joins a series of other recent security updates, with which Hotmail offers advanced security safeguards to help protect your email account from hijackers and fraud.
If you’ve been reading this blog for the last few months, you’ve seen lots of new features added to Hotmail that make Hotmail more efficient, like Sweep or the ability to send up to 10GB of photos in one message. Some of you sent feedback asking if there’s a way to use these features without the hassle of getting a brand new email address.
By now you should all have the latest Hotmail update announced back in September 2010. As we mentioned last week, unfortunately the long-awaited full-session SSL (or HTTPS) feature did not make the cut in this update. We know that this feature will be coming quite soon – and we’ve been seeing this option in some of the internal testing sites:
Link – http://www.liveside.net/2010/10/25/some-details-about-the-upcoming-hotmail-full-session-ssl-feature/
Not too long ago, account hijacking was an issue limited mostly to financial service websites. Now the practice has grown to threaten other web services like email, disrupting millions of accounts every year. When an email account is compromised by hijackers, it violates the privacy of the account owner, can harm those in their address book, and adds additional costs to the services fighting the abuse.
We’ve kept ourselves busy this summer. A few months ago, we released a re-invented Windows Live Hotmail designed around what people said they wanted—a more efficient service to help them manage clutter with features like Sweep and one-click filters, save time with ActiveViews, share hundreds of large photos in a single email, and be more productive with Office by viewing and editing documents right from Hotmail
Hotmail is making it easier for you to stay up-to-date and be productive on your phone. Starting today, you can get your email, calendar, and contacts pushed automatically to your phone using Exchange ActiveSync (EAS). EAS keeps everything in sync between your phone and Hotmail, so whatever you do on your phone, like delete an email, add an appointment, or update one of your contacts with a new number, will also be reflected on the web, and vice-versa.
Microsoft is gradually enabling Hotmail push email support for a wide range of phones including the iPhone, Windows Phone devices and Android.
Microsoft is introducing the support using Exchange ActiveSync, available on nearly 300 million phones. With push email you can sychronize email between your phone and the web, and also synchronize calendar and contacts. Microsoft originally revealed its plans back in April this year.
Link – http://www.neowin.net/news/hotmail-is-gradually-switching-on-exchange-activesync-for-push-mail
Microsoft rolled out to all of its Hotmail users the newest version of its Web-based e-mail program in early August. Since that time, a number of users have been reporting problems accessing and composing their mail when using the latest release.
“During the Windows Live Hotmail rollout, we discovered some customers are having issues. We are working quickly to resolve these issues and apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing our customers. If a customer is experiencing an issue, they should check the Windows Live Solution Center to report their issue and find potential solutions,†said a company spokesperson I contacted via e-mail.
Link – http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsofts-new-hotmail-not-a-smooth-transition-for-all/7046
Here at Hotmail, we’ve had quite a busy week! All of our customers are now upgraded. The majority of you got the new Hotmail just this past week, as we completed the rollout to over 350 million people in more than 220 countries around the world. Now, everyone can take advantage of a faster Hotmail experience with great new features like one-click filters, Sweep, Active Views and more.
