Today, we released an update for Windows Live Essentials 2011 in all 48 languages. This minor release includes numerous updates across all of the programs in the Essential package, including Windows Live Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Family...

Hotmail has come a long way in spam protection and is now among the best in the industry in keeping spam out of your i nbox. Our own internal metrics, customer feedback, and even a recent third-party report confirms that no mail service offers better...

Over the course of 3 years, I’ve created a TON of panoramic stitches with Windows Live Photo Gallery ( see this blog post on details on how to do your own panoramic stitches!). And I really want to have one of my panoramic stitches printed and custom...

I have over a decade’s worth of digital photos on my PC. I love taking photos. I love capturing the moment where ever that might be – with friends and family over the holidays or out in the middle of no-where in eastern Washington State. Most...

We’ve previously talked about the principles that guide us as we strive to continue delivering the most convenient ways to chat with the people who matter the most to you. Today we’re taking another step, with the public availability of access to the...

Two handy and much-anticipated new Microsoft apps for Windows Phone were headed to Marketplace this week. Here’s a peek: SkyDrive SkyDrive, Microsoft’s free cloud storage service, is already tightly woven into the Office and Pictures Hubs. So you might...

This post has been updated to correct an error in the example showing how to upload a text file via HTTP POST. With the announcements on Windows Store we wanted to share new work we were doing to help developers on Windows, Windows Phone and other platforms...

The Hotmail team got some great (and humbling) news recently – Hotmail was named best web application of 2011 by PC Magazine . We were particularly excited to see that people are taking notice of Hotmail’s war on Graymail and the work we’ve done this...

SkyDrive has grown tremendously since we launched in 2007, and recently, we've made a number of updates to SkyDrive: In June we overhauled our website and used the latest browser standards to simplify our photos and documents experience, while also making...

With my busy job at Microsoft, it’s hard for me to stay in touch with friends and family year round. I lived in Maine ten years ago, then Canada, then Colorado, DC and finally NYC before moving to Seattle. That means a lot of friends in a lot of different...

Microsoft Outlook is the most popular email software in the world with more than 150 million active users. Hotmail is the largest email service in the world with more than 350 million active users. Outlook and Hotmail are better together, and our teams...

The following blog is a guest post by one of our Windows Champions bloggers . Gigi Ross is a mom of two hailing from southern California. Her blog, KludgyMom , combines a snappish take on parenting with technology and blogging tips to make women's lives...

Hotmail is the world’s leading email service, and last year we added support for Exchange Active Sync , allowing customers around the world to sync their Hotmail inbox, calendar, and contacts to their mobile phones through the power of Exchange. ...

Krista is the resident “Techspert” for the Digital Workshop- powered by Windows- on board the MS Westerdam, a ship in Holland America ’s fleet. Krista works with passengers to help them learn about the newest Windows 7 technologies. The following is a...

In previous posts on our blog, we talked about how we’ve reduced true spam in the inbox to under 3% using SmartScreen™ filtering. But we realized that getting rid of true spam wasn’t enough, because 75% of the email messages that people reported as spam...

Ever wonder how Hotmail stores the billions of email messages we receive each day? Keeping our customers’ data safe and readily available is an immense responsibility that we take very seriously. And to do so efficiently at our scale is a sizeable engineering...

Last week we released the developer preview of Windows 8 (WDP) at the //BUILD conference. While we covered a lot in the keynote , I wanted to provide folks who’ve been following our services for some time with a quick summary of what we talked about and...

This blog post is a follow-up on the outage that occurred on September 8th. Just before 8:00 PM PDT that day, we became aware of a Domain Name Service (DNS) issue that was causing a service interruption for some some Microsoft services, including Windows...

ZDNet’s Ed Bott penned a very thorough comparison of Photo Gallery 2011 and iPhoto ‘11 in The Ed Bott Report this past week. While he doesn’t go so far as to declare a winner, he highlights some clear advantages to our design approach. In a lot of ways...

If you've been trying to use Hotmail, SkyDrive, or our other Live properties in the last couple of hours you may have noticed problems accessing our services. We're aware of these issues and actively working to resolve them. We apologize for the inconvenience...