Microsoft Previews Reinvented Windows Live Hotmail

Just received this information from Microsoft. Microsoft is revamping its Hotmail and added more social elements in it. Read the full details with Fact Sheet after the break.

Microsoft Previews Reinvented Windows Live Hotmail

The new Hotmail: the next generation in personal email

Singapore – May 18, 2010 – Microsoft Corp. today previewed the new Windows Live Hotmail – the next generation of personal email – designed with smart tools that help people manage the clutter in their inboxes, save time on the most common tasks they do with email, take the headache out of sharing large attachments like photos, and view and edit Microsoft Office documents right in the Hotmail inbox using just a browser.

Today’s inboxes are overflowing with mail that most people consider junk, even though it’s mail that’s legitimate it’s still not easy for customers to keep their inbox clean and organized. To help the new Hotmail delivers the first and only virtual broom, enabling customers to easily sweep unwanted mail out of your inbox. It also helps cut through clutter with intelligent filters that in a single click will filter the entire inbox to show mail just from contacts, just social network alerts, or just mail from the groups users belong too.

With the new Hotmail, customers will also find ways to save time doing the things they most often do with email because Hotmail is giving people the ability to do things that would normally require them to leave their inboxes and jump to other websites. Now customers will be able to see rich previews of photos and videos from popular sites like Flickr, YouTube, Hulu and SmugMug, and see the status of tracked packages in real time, inside their emails. They’ll also be able to accept invitations to connect with someone on a social or professional networking site like LinkedIn – all from the convenience of their inboxes.

“With over 360 million active Hotmail accounts worldwide, we have spent a lot of time listening to customer feedback and thoughtfully designing solutions to meet their needs,” stated Haresh Khoobchandani, Senior Director, Business and Marketing Organisation, Microsoft Singapore. “Whether it’s organizing events, managing commercial transactions, searching for jobs, sharing photos, or communicating with friends and family, the new Hotmail will help increase personal productivity.”

One of the biggest changes to Hotmail is the increased ability to manage and share personal photos and documents. Today, people are sharing over 1.5 billion photos and 350 million Microsoft Office documents per month in Hotmail . Still, the “attachment size problem” remains, regardless of which mail service people use. The new Hotmail lets’ customers send up 10 GB of attachments in a single message, erasing worries of attachment size limits. Send up to 200 attachments – each up to 50 MB in size – in a single message.

With the new version of Hotmail customers are able to view and edit Office documents right in inbox, and all you need is your browser to do so.

“By making it possible for you to create and edit Office documents right in your inbox, Hotmail makes it easier for you to be productive from virtually anywhere,” says Haresh Khoobchandani.

New features previewed today include those that help you quickly find important messages and manage the clutter in your inbox so that you can stay organized.

Hotmail highlights: Immediately see if you have new email from friends, social network updates, shipments, appointments and birthday reminders – all in a single glance the moment you log in.
Sweep. With this virtual broom you can quickly ‘sweep’ all unwanted mail out of your inbox and into folders or the trash. You can tell Hotmail to perform sweeps automatically with the simple check of a box. And you can sweep mail from your Gmail and Yahoo! Mail accounts by adding them to your Hotmail inbox, where you can send and receive mail from other email services.
One click filters. In just a single click you can filter your entire inbox to show you the mail you care about most, whether it’s all messages from your contacts or from social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn or mailing groups you belong to. You can also click once to find all messages that contain photos, documents, videos, shipping updates or messages you’ve flagged.
Advanced search and automated search suggestions. Not only has Hotmail added an advanced search pane, but we’ve also made advanced search easy with inbox search auto-complete. From the moment you type a single letter into the search box, Hotmail automatically suggests a number of searches so that you can more quickly find the messages you’re looking for.
Conversation view. Group your emails by conversation or don’t – it’s completely up to you. A single click turns conversation view on or off.

Microsoft also showed off work they’ve done together with a collection of top websites to enable people to do more without having to continually leave their inboxes.

Active views: A lot of messages prompt you to leave your inbox and hop to other websites to complete actions. Hotmail is saving you time by enabling you to complete those actions right within the messages themselves, whether it’s viewing photos from Hulu, YouTube, or Justin.tv, or photos on Flickr or SmugMug, tracking the shipping status of packages in real time, or interacting with services like LinkedIn – all from the convenience of your inbox.

Given that security and privacy protection is at the forefront of everything that Microsoft does, the new Hotmail will provide a number of additional measures to help people keep their accounts safe.

Industry leading spam-fighting. By utilizing Microsoft’s SmartScreen spam and malware cloud-based filtering heuristics – technology also used by Microsoft Exchange Server, Forefront, and Internet Explorer to protect against spam and malicious code – Hotmail has been able to reduce the amount of spam in the average inbox from what was a “low” of 35% of the average Hotmail inbox back in 2006 to just 4% today – a best practice for personal webmail. Hotmail continues leverage Microsoft’s $9.5 Billion R&D investment to innovate new ways to minimize spam and to outpace the bad guys. Some of innovations that the new Hotmail brings with it include time traveling filters, personalized spam filtering, spam tagging, and spammer infrastructure detection.
Trusted senders. With the new Hotmail, we help you to visually identify trusted senders in your inbox, particularly banks and other senders most commonly impersonated in phishing scams, by putting safety logos next to those senders who we recognize as legitimate.
Full-session SSL. In addition to providing SSL encryption of credentials 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.
Single-use codes. This new security feature is designed to further protect you by giving you the option to ask Hotmail to SMS to you a one-time temporary password if you’d prefer not to use your regular password when logging into Hotmail on public computers that could potentially harbor key logging malware that could steal your password, such as those sometimes found in internet cafes and airports.

Additional feature investments in the new Hotmail include the following.

Rich mobile browse. With the new Hotmail, the mobile experience is optimized for rich browsers and touch, so that the user experience feels seamless on the latest phones. The inbox supports filters, in-line message previews, HTML messages, offline e-mail viewing, conversation threading, the ability to flag messages, the option to turn header details on or off, and more.
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 from your phone’s web browser.
Exchange ActiveSync. Hotmail supports push email on the Web, PC, and now also on the mobile phone. Using Exchange ActiveSync, available on nearly 300 million phones, you can not only seamlessly synchronize Hotmail between your phone and the Web, but also synchronize your calendar and contacts
Single contact list. The new Hotmail enables you to bring all your online contacts into one convenient place – even those from services like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace or other email services like Gmail, Yahoo!, or AOL. Hotmail makes it easy to merge or remove duplicate entries for the same contact.
IM in the inbox. Improved integration of Messenger will maks it easier to see who’s online and chat with one or more people in the same window with tabbed conversations – all from within the Hotmail inbox.
IM with Facebook friends. IM with all your buddies – not just those on Messenger, but also those on Facebook.
Send and receive mail from other services like Gmail and Yahoo!. Now easier than ever to aggregate your accounts in Hotmail.
Post comments to Facebook and other websites. Do this from the Hotmail home page, a page you can see when you log in or permanently skip if you’d rather just got to your inbox on log in.
Update your status on Facebook and Windows Live Messenger. Also from the Hotmail home page.
Ever growing storage. While this isn’t new, we wanted to remind you that Hotmail gives you 5 GB to start with and then automatically adds lots of additional storage each month if you run out. That’s why some people today are using well over 20 GB of storage in Hotmail.
More themes. More ways to personalize your inbox than ever.

The new Hotmail will begin to rollout in June to customers worldwide. Learn more about the preview today by visiting http://www.hotmailpreview.com/ and sign up for Hotmail today at www.hotmail.com.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Here is the factsheet on the Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail.

Windows Live Hotmail

Fact Sheet | May 2010

Windows Live Hotmail is one of the world’s largest e-mail providers with more than 360 million active accounts, providing features for an efficient and clutter-free inbox whether via the Web, a mobile phone or a PC.

All about the new Hotmail

With the new Hotmail, Microsoft Corp. focused on three simple things to help make the inbox more efficient, including providing tools to dramatically cut down on all the clutter in your inbox, not just the spam, helping you to save time doing the most common things in your inbox and making it easier to view, share, and edit Microsoft Office documents in the cloud.

Enhanced security

Microsoft SmartScreen. SmartScreen helps distinguish between legitimate e-mail messages and spam based on Internet protocol 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. So we’ve invested in learning about that on the fly based on the individual.
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. By going beyond just filtering spam, the new Hotmail has features to help combat spammer infrastructure head-on, which can make sending spam more difficult, and helps cut down on spam.
Time Traveling Filters. Through the new Hotmail, we’re fine-tuning our ability to retroactively remove spam while detecting the signatures of a new spam effort.
Trusted Senders. Trusted Senders is a feature that will visually demarcate (e.g., a padlock or shield icon) e-mails in inboxes from specific senders that it recognizes as legitimate, helping you easily tell the good from the scams. We put a small safety logo next to messages from Trusted Senders.

Eliminate the clutter

Hotmail Highlights. Immediately see if you have new e-mail from friends, social network updates, shipments, appointments and birthday reminders — all in a single glance when you log in.
1-Click Filters. With a single click, filter the e-mails you’re currently viewing to show only those that are unread, from contacts, or from social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. No setup is required.
Quick Views. See all the e-mails that contain photos across your entire account, including your inbox, folders and POP aggregated e-mail accounts, with one click. You can see all of your documents, videos, shipping updates or mails you’ve flagged. The new Hotmail lets you bring into one view 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, the advanced-made-easy search in Hotmail 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.
Conversation View. We know how having a conversation with someone — or several people — on e-mail over an extended period can leave pieces of that conversation haphazardly spread throughout the inbox in individual snippets. The new Hotmail brings all of those snippets together so you can view the entire conversation in one place. Conversation View is an option that users can turn on or off, because not everyone prefers to view e-mail in Conversation View.
View all from Sender. While reading an e-mail from someone, it is quick and easy to check other e-mails received in the past from the same sender. It’s as simple and intuitive as hovering over their name and selecting “Find e-mail.”
Sweep. Sweep is a short menu of simple actions that lets you sweep the mail you don’t want out of your inbox into either folders or oblivion, leaving your inbox clean.

Get more done

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, via link, up to 200 photos, each up to 50 MB in size (10 GB total), in a single message.
Active Views. Thanks to an extensible e-mail platform, the new Hotmail saves you the inconvenience of hopping from your inbox to different partner websites by integrating some of the content and functionality of those websites into the e-mails you receive from them.
IM and SMS with your Messenger friends. With the new Hotmail, you can see who’s online, just click to chat with a Windows Live Messenger friend, or even send an SMS message to his or her phone if he or she is offline — all without leaving your inbox.
Single Contact List. The new Hotmail taps into the unified contact list that sits under all Windows Live services — the address book that integrates all your contacts from Hotmail, Messenger and also from other networks (such as Facebook and MySpace). It brings your online contacts into one convenient place, helps you manage duplicates, and lets you easily view information for any contact across the different networks and connect with them.
Rich Mobile Browse. Many consumers who use mobile phones as their primary way to access e-mail and the Internet — and even those who do most of their e-mail on the PC — demand a robust e-mail experience from just about anywhere they’re connected to the Internet. With the new Hotmail, the mobile experience is optimized for rich browsers and touch, so that the user experience feels seamless on the latest phones. The inbox supports filters, in-line message previews, HTML messages, offline e-mail viewing, conversation threading, the ability to flag messages, the option to turn header details on or off, and more.
Exchange ActiveSync. Hotmail supports push e-mail on the Web, PC and now also on the mobile phone. Using Exchange ActiveSync, available on nearly 300 million phones, with the new Hotmail you can not only seamlessly synchronize e-mail between your phone and the Web, but also synchronize your calendar and contacts.
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 are a Windows Live Calendar user, you can use Exchange 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, you can access Windows Live Calendar virtually anywhere using your phone’s browser.
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.

View, share and edit Office documents in the cloud

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 PC or Mac and even if Office is not installed (or if you have an older version). This results from the seamless integration between Hotmail, SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps, so you can send, receive and work on a document with others.
High-fidelity viewing. Right from your browser, you can view Office documents (sent to you in Hotmail) with excellent fidelity. This means that if you’re travelling and want to be able to view a PowerPoint presentation or you’re on the road and want to read a Word document, you now get high-quality viewing even when you’re away from your PC.
Easy and familiar editing on the Web. In a single click on your PC, you can go from viewing an Office attachment opened from Hotmail in your browser to editing it (also in your browser), made even easier with the familiarity of the Office Ribbon and key Office functionality.
Edit Office documents in your browser (with the Office Web Apps) or in Office on your PC. 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 your PC will be automatically saved back into the cloud where you can then keep the document stored for only you to see or share it with others.
Work with others — even those friends not on Hotmail. If you’re using the new Hotmail, you can e-mail Office documents to people on other e-mail services (including Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) and they too can view and edit your Office documents in the cloud. Nothing is needed to view the document, and all they need is a Windows Live ID to edit it.
Versioning. And with multiple edited versions of the same document, you can easily 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. By using SkyDrive, people you share your docs with will be able to view and edit them — even if they don’t have Office installed.

Help protect your account

Single-Use Code. This new security feature is designed to further protect you when you sign in on public computers, such as 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 helping to prevent it from being stolen by key-loggers and the like.
Full Session SSL. In addition to providing secure sockets layer (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’ve gone the extra mile to visually identify trusted senders in your inbox, particularly banks and the like, which are commonly used for phishing scams. Features such as DomainKeys Identified Mail and Sender ID further strengthen these security measures, adding considerably to the protection of your account.
Account Proofs. The new Hotmail encourages you to increase the security of your account by adding what we call Proofs — personal information you can associate with your Hotmail account. Proofs can help you recover access to and control over an account that someone has taken from you, which is a risk confronting all public Web mail services since hijacking scams aren’t technology-dependent.

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Microsoft Previews Reinvented Windows Live Hotmail