Hotmail declares war on graymail

Microsoft Hotmail characterizes an email as "graymail" when the same message that one person thinks is “spam” could be really important to another person. It’s not black and white, hence the name.

What's in your inbox?

Despite the drastic decrease of true spam in the inbox, we found that most customers are still seeing newsletters, product offers, and other clutter. In fact, 75% of email identified as spam by our customers actually turns out to be unwanted graymail that they receive as a result of having signed up on a legitimate website. And because of inbox clutter, it’s easy to lose track of the really important messages in your inbox that you want to get back to.

Some features are:

1. New newsletter category

A new special category for newsletters. Using the same SmartScreen™ technology that helps Microsoft fight spam, email are categorized correctly as newsletters 95%. Every time you categorize an email manually the remaining 5% emails as a newsletter, the filtering just gets better.

2. One-click unsubscribe

With Hotmail unsubscribing from a newsletter is just a click away and Hotmail will let the site know to stop mailing you, use Sweep to immediately clean up your mail and remove all the old newsletters from that sender, and finally send any new ones that come in to your junk mail until the sender takes you off their list.

3. Schedule Cleanup

Schedule Cleanup, a new tool, unique to Hotmail, that works behind the scenes to keep your inbox organized.

With Schedule Cleanup, you can:

• Keep only the latest message from a given sender
• Delete messages as they get old (3 days, 10 days, 30 days, or 60 days)
• Move messages to a folder as they get old

Here are some ways to use Schedule Cleanup:

• Keep only the latest event calendar email from your favorite site
• Keep only the latest deal from Groupon or LivingSocial, or any other deal vendor
• Delete your newsletters after 10 days – that way, whether you read them or not, they are never clogging up your inbox
• Automatically archive mail from your financial institutions to a folder after 30 days

4. Keeping important mail right up front: Flags done right

At Hotmail, we think the right way to track important messages is with flags, and our upcoming changes make flags even more powerful.

When you feel a message is important, flag it to be it “pinned” to the top of your inbox and stays there, even as new email comes in. This means it is easy to keep track of your most important messages. What’s more, you can even set up rules to automatically flag incoming mail from certain senders, so that your most important mail is always right there at the top of your inbox.

5. Have different types of email? Create custom categories

You can quickly create a new category and apply that category to all related messages at the same time – no searching for mail, no complex rules to create. You can categorize messages right in the message list with the new categories column. And categories show up as QuickViews right next to folders, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

» Hotmail declares war on graymail | Inside Windows Live

Hotmail to hold special event on October 3

Microsoft is to hold a special event on October 3 for Hotmail, inviting reporters to write on it and the public to have a second look on it.

The invitation reads:

WE LISTENED. WE LEARNED. WE REINVENTED HOTMAIL FROM THE GROUND UP.
From performance to spam to security and more, we’re going to challenge your perceptions and show how we stack up against the competition.

Ironically, this invitation comes untimely at a time when Windows Live and Hotmail services went into an outage.

» Microsoft to hold Hotmail press event on October 3 | liveside.net

Windows Live and Hotmail services outage

It was reported on Windows Live blog that Hotmail, SkyDrive, or other Live properties were not working on 8 Sep PST. At current time, it seems to be back in service, at least for me.

» Current Hotmail and SkyDrive Issues | Inside Windows Live

Hotmail: Sweep unwanted mail out

Hotmail helps you get rid of unwanted email with the Sweep menu. It also allows you to sweep such email in the future from your inbox to trash or a folder. Quite an useful way to organize emails.

» Hotmail: Sweep unwanted mail out | Hotmail Tips

Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail shows Cc as To for recipient

I just realised Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail actually shows recipient in the "To" list by default even if it is meant to be a "Cc".

Default showing all in "To"

After enabling "Show Details", recipients in the "Cc" list will then be shown.

"Cc" shown after "Show Details" enabled

Is this a feature? Wonder if "Show Details" can be enabled by default.

Microsoft Hotmail adds "My friend's been hacked" feature

Microsoft has just beefed up its free web-based email Hotmail security with new features that make it easier to report hacked email accounts.

The next time you receive an email from a friend but realised it in fact is not sent from him after opening it, you can flag this to Microsoft by clicking on the “My friend’s been hacked!” on the “Mark as” menu.

Once the account is flagged as compromised, two things happen:

• First and foremost, the account can no longer be used by the spammer.
• When your friend attempts to access their account, they’re put through an account recovery flow that helps them take back control of the account.

Apart from the "My friend's been hacked" security feature, Microsoft has also made it harder for users to set easily hackable passwords to begin with. Common passwords like "password" and "123456" are no longer permitted. According to Microsoft, this new feature will be rolling out soon. If you're already using a common password, you may, at some point in the future, be asked to change it to a stronger password.

» Hey! My friend’s account was hacked! | The Windows Blog

Facebook chat in Hotmail is rolled out to all

Microsoft announced Monday that Facebook chat is now available to Hotmail users worldwide, wherever Facebook has a presence according to a blog post, that's after having brought Facebook Chat available through Messenger a few weeks ago.

And while Gmail beat us to bringing their own chat into the inbox, we have now gone a step further and brought both our own chat and Facebook chat into your inbox. Starting now, we will be displaying notifications of this update in Hotmail.

Facebook chat in Hotmail now available everywhere [via]

Hotmail new alias feature allows you to use multiple email addresses on one account!

The Windows Live Team announced a new feature on Hotmail that allows user to create and manage multiple email aliases from a single Hotmail account. The new aliasing feature makes it easy to use a different email address and still get all the benefits of Hotmail without having to change your primary email address and online identity.

Up to five aliases can be added per year to your Hotmail account, up to fifteen aliases in total, all designed to make it a lot easier to organize different types of email and personas in one Hotmail inbox without having to give out your primary email address if you don’t want to. Just simply give out the alias email address to the right group of users.

Email aliases let you create completely different email addresses that you can use to receive email into your primary account without anyone knowing what your primary email address is.

Hotmail delivers aliases to help you manage and secure your email account [via]

Microsoft Hotmail emptied inboxes restored

On 31th December 2010, some users of Microsoft's very own webmail service Hotmail were reported to have seen emails in their mailboxes emptied. All previous mails in the inbox and all personal folders were all gone. Upon successful login, they were greeted with a first system welcome message as if their accounts were new.

According to a blog post on by the Microsoft team, the issue which had impacted 17,355 accounts was resolved. The root cause of the problem was found and mails from the impacted accounts restored.

Microsoft Hotmail inboxes emptied on 31 Dec 2010

On 31th December 2010, some users of Microsoft's very own webmail service Hotmail were reported to have seen emails in their mailboxes emptied. All previous mails in the inbox and all personal folders were all gone. Upon successful login, they were greeted with a first system welcome message as if their accounts were new.

This email outage is going to be a hit to Microsoft's image. Any updates from Microsoft will be reported here as soon as possible.

Hotmail Users Report Blank Inboxes [via]

The new Hotmail

Microsoft's Revamped Hotmail Begins Rollout

Microsoft's Windows Live blog announced that Hotmail Wave 4 has started rolling out to the 360 million worldwide users of the venerable web mail service.

The updated email service includes a new Sweep feature to tidy up inboxes, integration with Microsoft's new Office Web Apps, and a Gmail-like conversation view

Microsoft's Revamped Hotmail Begins Rollout [via]

Microsoft reworked Hotmail to challenge Google Gmail

It now seems that Google has a lot to work on to catch up with Microsoft Hotmail.

The New Hotmail Challenges Gmail [via]

Webmail like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail had passwords leaked

The scale of a phishing attack originally thought to be directed and contained only at Hotmail is now spreaded to other service providers like Yahoo, AOL and Gmail.

Scam hits more e-mail accounts [via]

Google Chrome Spoof to be Safari to Get Past Hotmail

Google Chrome spoof itself as Safari to get past Microsoft's online email service, Hotmail. The reason for doing this is because Hotmail barred the competitor’s browser from entering by checking the user agent. The latest update offered by Google Chrome resolved this issue by a workaround - changing its user agent to Safari.

In my opinion, Microsoft's slowness in recognizing Google Chrome browser is unfair. I think Microsoft will react soon after Google has now stepped in with a workaround. This matter is now blown big and is known to many.

Google Chrome Spoofing User Agent at Hotmail [via]

Hotmail Email Storage Up to 5 GB

Microsoft's Live Hotmail now offers 5 GB of email storage space. Yahoo's mail is currently offering unlimited storage space and Google's GMail is currently offering 2.89 GB of storage space.