Here at Hotmail, we’ve been busy getting our latest release out to our customers – upgrading server clusters, building the new indexes for conversation threading, and making tweaks to our site metrics and deployment software. This deployment was complex, but it has been one of the smoothest in Hotmail history. We know many of you have been anxious to get the new Hotmail for your own accounts ever since we announced the new features, and we appreciate your patience and your feedback.
All posts tagged Hotmail
A behind-the-scenes look at designing the new Hotmail: part one
One of the things we hear about the most is inbox overload: folks want to find important emails quickly. Whether it’s an important back-and-forth conversation with friends or a YouTube video that brightened your day, it can be hard to find the messages that matter most. When we set out to design the new Hotmail, our main goal was to solve the problem of too much clutter.
Update on the rollout of the new Hotmail
The Hotmail rollout continues to go along smoothly and we’re right on track with our release plan, having now upgraded nearly 50 million accounts on several different clusters. Of course, we continue to get comments from many of you who are eager to get access to the new Hotmail, and we’re just as eager to get the new version out to everyone.
Update to the Hotmail rollout
There is a lot of excitement about the new Hotmail, and we are certainly eager to get the latest release into the hands of all our customers. Several of you have asked, “When will the new Hotmail come to my country?†As we mentioned in our earlier announcement, we don’t roll out by country (or by language, or anything else like that).
The new Hotmail is rolling out now!
You may start seeing the new features in you inbox as early as today, features like the new Sweep menu, the freshly integrated Office Web Apps, huge new attachment limits up to 10 GB using SkyDrive, and the ability to create and send photo albums right from Hotmail. If you don’t see these features today, please hold on just a little while longer – everybody will be upgraded this summer.
Tagline to be removed from Hotmail Messages
When Hotmail first started in the mid-90s, taglines helped people to discover our then revolutionary new type of personal email service … free web-based email. At the time, most people had an address tied to an ISP like an AOL, CompuServe, or Prodigy email, and taglines were an efficient way to let people know about Hotmail. As Hotmail evolved over the years, so did taglines, taking on the additional role of educating people about new features & services in Hotmail and other related products. They proved to be effective, with nearly 2 million taglines clicked per month.
Link – http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2010/06/11/tagline-to-be-removed-from-hotmail-messages.aspx
Security upgrades in the new Hotmail
We were excited to share with you last week a preview of the brand new Hotmail, available starting later this summer. To follow up, we wanted to share a little more detail around some of the security investments we’ve made in the new Hotmail.
Security remains the number one concern of people who use email and a top priority for all Microsoft development efforts, products, and services – Hotmail included.
New ways we’re fighting spam in Hotmail
Hotmail’s fight against spam has certainly come a long way in the last five years. Over the last several years we’ve made substantial investments in the research and development of sophisticated anti-spam technologies. SmartScreen is the collective name we use for a cloud-based set of technologies and algorithms that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to assign a “spam probability†score to each incoming message.
Microsoft Rolls out Hotmail Enhancements
Microsoft is set to begin rolling out the latest enhancements to its Hotmail Web mail service, with an aim to reduce clutter and make it easier to send photos and handle Office documents
Microsoft is taking a clear shot at Google’s success with its online Docs service by making a Web-based version of Office available from within Hotmail’s Web interface that allows use of widely used document formats such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
Link – http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/196490/microsoft_rolls_out_hotmail_enhancements.html
Re-inventing Windows Live Hotmail – the next generation of personal email
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how consumers are using their email and how they manage their inboxes. We’ve also talked about how we decide what to build based on what we hear from customers.
Today, we’re excited to give you a preview of the new Windows Live Hotmail, representing the next generation in personal email.
Re-inventing Windows Live Hotmail – the next generation of personal email
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how consumers are using their email and how they manage their inboxes. We’ve also talked about how we decide what to build based on what we hear from customers.
Today, we’re excited to give you a preview of the new Windows Live Hotmail, representing the next generation in personal email.
Office team releases new Outlook Hotmail Connector
If you have been using Outlook Connector 12.1, you already know that it allows you to manage your Windows Live Hotmail e-mail, calendar, and contacts from within Outlook. Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 introduces several improvements. For example, you might notice after upgrading that the connection to Hotmail is more reliable than before, and issues such as blank messages being synchronized to Outlook have been fixed.
New golden Windows Live Hotmail logo unveiled
A recent behind-the-scenes video about the infrastructure of Windows Live Hotmail has let loose a new golden logo for Windows Live Hotmail presumably for the imminent Windows Live “Wave 4″ refresh.
As straightforward as it might be, this logo actually comes at somewhat of a surprise to me since it contrasts with current text-based “Wave 3″ Windows Live branding with a Windows logo, the name “Windows Live†and the name of the service affixed to the end wordmark.
A short history of Hotmail
Hotmail was born on July 4th, 1996 – the creation of a Silicon Valley startup founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. It was one of the very first services to offer free web-based e-mail. Originally, Hotmail was spelled “HoTMaiL,†emphasizing its use of HTML for the web user interface. Hotmail became popular quickly, and by the end of 1997 already had millions of customers. Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft late in 1997 and was later integrated with another acquisition – the web-based calendar service, Jump. Hotmail continued to grow very quickly – reaching tens of millions of users in just a few years. Today, Hotmail has provisioned well over a billion inboxes and has several hundred million active users around the world.
Link – http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowslive/archive/2010/01/06/a-short-history-of-hotmail.aspx
A peek behind the scenes at Hotmail
Hi, my name is Arthur de Haan and I am responsible for Test and System Engineering in Windows Live. To kick things off, I’d like to give you a look behind the scenes at Hotmail, and tell you more about what it takes to build, deploy and run the Windows Live Hotmail service on such a massive global scale.
Hosting your mail and data (and our own data!) on our servers is a big responsibility and we take quality, performance, and reliability very seriously. We make significant investments in engineering and infrastructure to help keep Hotmail up and running 24 hours a day, day in and day out, year after year. You will rarely hear about these efforts – you will only read about them on the rare occasion that something goes wrong and our service has run into an issue,.
