Yesterday night I was invited by Microsoft Malaysia to attend an event where they want to talk about Hotmail, their title is: Fall in love with Hotmail again — it’s easy O’RLY? I had been a gmail “power user” for a while, and i dont think they will ever convinced me to switch back to hotmail.
But after the event, they changed my view completely! Well, its time to give Hotmail a second chance, right!?
I think many of you still remember the old days of Hotmail. 2MB mailbox storage, 1MB attachment limit, and most of the mail i got are spam, and if i dont clean them up once a few weeks, my inbox will be full. Well, those days had gone. The new era of Hotmail has come. This month, is Hotmail’s 15th anniversary, and Hotmail is rolling out new features to users now, more new amazing innovative features to all of the users.
Barrie Ooi, Head of Windows Live, Asia Pacific, Microsoft, said during his keynote, “We’ve all used Hotmail at one point in time, and we loved it for its features and simplicity. Things are a little bit more complicated today. People want more than just an email address. Users want huge storage space, seamless integration with instant messaging and contact management as well as easy access across mobile devices. With our latest Hotmail release, we are bringing all this and more to our users. Hotmail has come a long way since its humble beginnings. It is now more feature rich, more integrated and more secure than ever before. It’s the perfect time to fall in love all over again with Hotmail,”
Barrie Ooi introduced five new features that will be rolled out to users in phases starting from now, there are:
- Smart Newsletter Filtering which allows users to highlight and delete newsletters with a single click or unsubscribe completely.
- Categories and advanced folder management that allow users to choose to categorize their messages in the inbox as opposed to having to file them in separate folders.
- Scheduled Cleanup allows you to automatically get rid of emails of a certain age, sweeping away old newsletters and out-of-date offers. You can also now keep only the latest message from a sender.
- Flags done right that position your priority messages right at the top of your inbox. No more having to mark messages as unread or email them back to yourself to keep them top of mind.
- Instant Actions are buttons that appear when your mouse hovers over a message allowing you to delete, flag, sweep, etc. messages with one click. Users can also customize their UI by adding and removing buttons based on the tasks they use most.
From that I can see, Hotmail is not only fighting with spam,where they now did a good job, your inbox is no longer filled with spam mail by using their SmartScreen technology, to now they are fighting GreyMail! You may wonder what is greymail, from what i understand is the email that you’ve subscribed to, like newsletter or groupon deal emails (where i get like 10 of them each day) and most likely you won’t like to read them all. Sweep is a sweet function that solve that problem.
Other interesting features of hotmail that i get know from the event are:
1. Android Hotmail App… FINALLY! Its launched today and available for all android phone! (Market Link)
2. Hotmail is 10-20x faster than last year! Thats significant!
3. Keyboard shortcuts! Oh Yeah, you can use your outlook, gmail or yahoo mail keyboard shortcut in Hotmail. They’ll work!
4. Single Use Code is handy where hotmail send a single use code to your mobile phone and you will enter that code instead of a password. Not really secure in my opinion (i still prefer 2 factor authentication like GMail has), but its worth a try!
5. Virtually Unlimited Storage, its no longer 2mb inbox, but still, i think they store most of your attachments in skydrive. Attachment limit is 100mb, but if you store them in SkyDrive, it doesnt count against that.
6. Hotmail makes beautiful thumbnail when you are sending a whole album of photos.
7. IE 9 desktop notification. You can pin hotmail on your taskbar, and it will show a little red circle notifying you have unread mail 
Oh other than that, Microsoft is focusing more in consumer business, and I heard words that saying Microsoft might be bring XBox to Malaysia Market in the near future! (Finally OMG Cant Wait)
For more information on the new Hotmail, there are links below that you can check out:
A look on Hotmail upcoming features
Android Hotmail App
Try out Hotmail before switch
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