Hotmail faces off with GMail, targets 'gray' mail

In a bid to better compete with Google's Gmail, Microsoft is introducing major updates to its Hotmail free email service, including a feature that targets what it calls "gray mail." Hotmail group program manager Dick Craddock said "gray" mail —unwanted but still legitimate newsletters, offers and notifications— comprises 75 percent of what many users report as spam. "(We had) true spam in the inbox to under 3 percent using SmartScreen filtering. But we realized that getting rid of true spam wasn’t enough, because 75 percent of the email messages that people reported as spam are really legitimate newsletters, offers, or notifications that you just don’t want anymore. We call this type of unwanted email graymail, and we’re excited to announce five powerful tools to help you take control of your inbox, get rid of graymail, and keep track of the email that’s important to you," he said in a blog post. Microsoft's Mark West, in an interview with WinRumors, also said secure sockets layer (SSL) will be on by default. Craddock said more than half of the mail in a typical inbox today includes newsletters or deals, while 17 percent are social updates, and about 14 percent are person-to-person email. The rest represents mail from group distribution lists, shopping receipts and commerce, and true spam, he said. He said Hotmail has acquired five new features that help customers take back control of their inbox. These include:

• New newsletter category, using the SmartScreen technology that helps Microsoft fight spam, to learn customers' preferences. Craddock said this is 95 percent accurate and will get better as it learns from users.
• One-click unsubscribe, to let a site know to stop mailing a customer, and to send any new newsletters to a user's Junk Mail folder until the sender takes the user off its list.
• Schedule Cleanup, which works behind the scenes to keep the inbox organized. It lets users keep only the latest message from a given sender, or delete old messages.
• Flags, to keep important mail right up front by pinning a message to the top of the inbox.
• Custom categories.

Craddock hinted at more on these features and others as they roll out in the coming weeks. Microsoft's Android app Microsoft also created an app for Android, offering:

- Push email to get messages on your phone without delay - Synced calendar and contacts - Viewing folders in Hotmail, including sub folders - Sending pictures from your phone using Hotmail - Supports multiple Hotmail accounts - Send, receive and view attachments

Hotmail's undeserved 'bad rap' A separate article in PC Magazine quoted Microsoft director Brian Hall and corporate vice president Chris Jones as saying Hotmail gets an unfair rap as a slow, old-fashioned, spam-ridden email service with small attachment size limits. Hall said that while this may have been true in 2006, Microsoft has since improved on Hotmail. Since 2006, he said the Webmail site has sped up tenfold overall, and is up to 22 times faster at some common operations, while Spam has gone from about 35 percent of the inbox contents to less than 3 percent. Also, he said attachments are nearly unlimited, with individual attachments up to 100 MB allowed. "Storage just isn't an issue anymore," he said, pointing to one user who had over 30GB of content in his Hotmail account. 'Lost with Hotmail' WinRumors reported Microsoft's West admitted to Microsoft having becoming lost with Hotmail, with Google coming out with Gmail and doing "some great stuff." “We really kind of lost our way a little bit. Gmail came out, they were doing some great stuff especially around storage and they were really being very disruptive and got an awful lot of traction off the back of that. We lost our focus on the end user. We’ve recognized that and realized that we have to make a lot of changes," he said. — TJD, GMA News