Hotmail turns 15, rolls out new features

As it marks its 15th "birthday" this month, Microsoft's email service Hotmail bared a list of new features for its users while touting gains in speed and security it made in recent months. Hotmail group program manager Dick Craddock said they are now rolling out the eighth batch of new features - including an Outlook-style calendar and an option to search for particular email messages - for this year alone. "Think we’ve taken a breather? Not a chance! It’s been an exciting 15 years, and especially this past year, but we’re still just getting started," he said in a blog post. Hotmail was started on July 4, 1996. Among the new features Hotmail is planning are a mini-calendar similar to that of Microsoft's email client Outlook; and a "go to" option in looking for a particular email messagee. Craddock said Hotmail also released important security upgrades, such as single-use codes for signing in from an unsecured location, and the use of the trusted senders icon to help determine if email messages are safe. Hotmail likewise added sub-folders and the ability to send 25-MB attachments, and more Active Views, including more support for videos and shipping notifications. "We enabled Exchange ActiveSync, which lets you sync your email, calendar, and contacts to your smartphone – whether that’s a Windows Phone, iPhone, or Android phone. And for your mobile browser, we added a mobile version of our Calendar service," Craddock said. Hotmail also gained the ability to turn on full-session SSL for an extra layer of protection when using Hotmail from an unsecured wireless network. Other new features included aliases to add new email addresses without the hassle of multiple accounts; Facebook chat; taskbar pinning, desktop notifications, and jump list support with Internet Explorer 9. "And we combined some clever programming tricks with the best of HTML5 to make your inbox much faster by speeding up performance by 10x on common tasks," Craddock said. Speed and security Hotmail program manager Matthew O'Day said that Hotmail is now "10 to 20 times faster than last year," and even faster than Google's Gmail in certain areas. O'Day also said that Hotmail improved its spam protection, filtering "more than 98 percent of spam" or blocking 5.5 billion spam messages every day. He added Hotmail has also been tweaked to work on smartphones. For his part, Craddock said Microsoft in 2010 integrated Hotmail with its Office productivity suite with a Quick View for documents and built-in support for Office Web Apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. "Over 40 million people use Office Web Apps in Hotmail every month," he said. Most number of users A separate article on PC Magazine cited figures by comScore showing that in early 2010, Hotmail has 364 million users, versus 280 million for Yahoo Mail, and 191 million for Gmail. But in September 2010, Compete.com estimated that 72.8 million use Yahoo Mail, 48.5 million use Hotmail, and 25.1 million users use Gmail —based on U.S.-only Internet traffic to those sites. "Many users have also traditionally selected a Webmail address - from Hotmail, Yahoo, or another service - and used it as a 'spam mail' account, entering it into an email field if a user needs to sign up for a contest, for example," it said. — TJD, GMA News