Hotmail's fight against spam has certainly come a long way in the last five years. Over the last several years we've made substantial investments in the research and development of sophisticated anti-spam technologies. SmartScreen is the collective name we use for a cloud-based set of technologies and algorithms that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to assign a “spam probability” score to each incoming message. This enables us to filter out over 98% of the spam sent to Hotmail inboxes, blocking 5.5 billion spam messages per day.  Microsoft utilizes SmartScreen across Hotmail, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Forefront, bringing consumers the benefit of business-grade spam protection on Hotmail.

With the soon-to-be-released new version of Hotmail, we’ve added a number of innovative new spam fighting technologies that will further reduce the amount of spam in your Hotmail inbox. Here's a short video featuring myself, Dick Craddock, and John Scarrow telling you a bit about how Hotmail's latest innovations help bring you the best spam fighting on the web.

New spam-fighting innovations include:

• More advanced IP and content filtering – Hotmail receives over 8 billion messages per day, giving us 8 billion input variables to work with and learn from. Each message we receive further informs SmartScreen’s IP filtering algorithms, making SmartScreen even “smarter.” Because Hotmail is the largest webmail service in the world, it also receives more telemetry on bad IPs than most any other service – either directly or through third parties. This gives our spam filters more opportunity to inform their artificial intelligence than pretty much any other service.
• Spammer infrastructure detection and destruction – SmartScreen not only blocks spam, it uses “x-ray vision” to see behind the URLs contained in malicious email to the source URLs, which we can then block along with their IPs. This means spammers have to abandon their current infrastructure and pay for new places to hide out. By making it more expensive to continue their business, we are taking away their economic incentive.
• Time-traveling filters – We can't always identify a new spammer the moment they start sending spam. But once we identify one, we can go back and clean out spam that they’ve already sent to your inbox before you ever see it. We call this a time-traveling filter, because in some sense we are able to go back in time and get rid of the spam even after it's been delivered!
• Personalized spam filtering – One person’s junk mail is another’s desired piece of mail.  Using artificial intelligence, Hotmail personalizes spam filtering according to the individual preferences of each of the 360+ million customers who use Hotmail, reducing false positives while improving effectiveness at the same time.
• Tagging – Hotmail tags each message you receive, whether in your inbox or in the Junk folder, to help you understand little bit more about why the message was categorized as it was. For example, if you previously marked messages from a sender as junk, we'll tell you that, or if you use a client email program with Hotmail, we'll tell you when that program has rules that result in moving a particular message to another folder. This gives you more direct control of spam management in your inbox unlike any other service.

Krish Vitaldevara
Senior Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how consumers are using their email and how they manage their inboxes. We've also talked about how we decide what to build based on what we hear from customers.

Today, we’re excited to give you a preview of the new Windows Live Hotmail, representing the next generation in personal email.

Email has changed a lot over the last five years. These days, you’re getting more email than ever – email that often requires you to leave your inbox to complete an action; you’re getting bigger and bigger attachments; and you’re using smart phones where you want to sync not only your email, but your contacts and calendar, too. In this post, we’ll talk about how we’ve built the new Hotmail, slated to launch this summer worldwide, to address the needs of the modern inbox.

The changing inbox

To refresh our perspective on peoples’ email needs as of 2010, we spent a lot of time taking a close look at how people are using email both in Hotmail and in other email services today. We found a number of interesting things.

People send and receive more email than ever, but the types of email are changing. In the past the inbox contained mostly mail from people you knew— your contacts. Today’s personal inbox is different. Mail from contacts is only a quarter of the typical inbox today; the rest of the inbox includes mail from social networks (20%), personal business (including newsletters, receipts, and shipping information), and “other mail” (which is typically junk mail or graymail). People made it clear to us that the number one thing they wanted their email service to address — whether it was Hotmail or any other email service — was to help them manage the clutter in their inbox; not just the spam, but all the mail they get that’s clogging their inboxes.

The content of email is different. While many messages are still just text, most of today’s email includes photos, documents, links, or other attachments. On Hotmail alone, people send and receive more than 1.5 billion photos and 350 million Office documents every month. What this means is that people have to leave their inboxes more and more often in order to complete common tasks like accepting social network invitations, viewing photo albums and videos, tracking packages, making purchases, tracking travel itinerary updates, and more.

People want to stay in touch on their phones and on the go. As we all know, people are doing more with smart phones than they ever have in the history of mobile communications. Expectations for mobile email are at their highest and include not just email, but also calendars, contacts, and tasks.

Re-inventing Hotmail

These changes were a call to action for our team. We knew we had an opportunity not just to add more features but to design our service with these new inbox needs in mind. So we set out to redesign Hotmail to help you:

• Take back your inbox. We help you quickly get to the important messages and get rid of the mail you don’t want.
• Get more done with the mail you receive. Do more without leaving your inbox, so that you don’t have to open a bunch of browser windows just to get simple things done.
• Share over email. Stop hassling with attachment size limits – whether you’re sending hundreds of large photos or massive documents. View, edit, and share Microsoft Office documents even if you or the people you’re sharing with don’t have Office installed on their computers – PC or Mac.
• Connect from your phone. Sync your email, calendar, and contacts on your mobile devices – whether you’re using a smart phone like the forthcoming Windows Phone 7, or the iPhone, or a phone that just has a simple browser.

Take back your inbox

With the new Hotmail, we’ve introduced practical innovations to help people manage the clutter and regain control of their inboxes – efficiently. What's more, you can manage clutter not only in your Hotmail inbox, but also in your inboxes from other email services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail Plus, or AOL, all from within Hotmail.

The moment you log into the new Hotmail, you can see at a glance that you now have a convenient and concise summary of the most important mail in your inbox - new email from friends and contacts, social network updates, shipping notices, appointments, and birthday reminders - along with a conveniently consolidated, privacy-protected stream of photos and updates from your closest friends on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, and over 70 other websites. The new Home page even lets you post comments directly to some of these sites and update your Facebook status. Of course, if you want to skip this page and just go straight to your inbox, there's a link at the bottom of the page so you can easily do that.

Once in your inbox, cut through the clutter by clicking just once to see all the mail from your contacts, or all of your social network updates (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.), or mail from the group mailing lists you belong to. You can also click once to see all messages that have links to photos or photos attached, or all messages that have Office documents attached, or shipping updates, or messages you’ve flagged.

Sweep away clutter. Once you’ve gone through the messages you want, it’s time to get rid of the ones that you don’t want. We know how to keep “true SPAM” out of your inbox, but we also know you still get a lot of other mail in your inbox that you don’t want. We call this "graymail" – legitimate mail that you signed up to receive or agreed to receive at one point, but you no longer want. The new Hotmail gives you the first and only virtual broom in any inbox out there, letting you sweep the mail you don’t want right out of your inbox – all in just a couple of clicks. No need to go to the trouble of creating and managing complex rules. Just sweep unwanted mail into folders for safe keeping or the trash for deleting, leaving your inbox clean and organized. You can even tell Hotmail to sweep incoming messages automatically on an ongoing basis (until you tell Hotmail otherwise) by simply checking a box. You can also sweep your Gmail and Yahoo! Mail Plus inboxes, too. Just add them into your Hotmail account and sweep the clutter from those accounts as well.

Get more done in your inbox

Now that you’ve got control of your inbox, we're also helping you get more done with the mail you get. This starts with Hotmail Active View – an automatic preview that brings your email to life. We're currently focusing Active View on giving you more ways to interact with messages you receive containing photos, links, and documents.

Photos. We know that email is still the most popular way to share photos. With the new Hotmail, we automatically show you a preview of your photo attachments, and let you view them as a slide show in a single click. No more leaving your inbox or complicated opening and saving – just click and view. It’s the way email should work. What’s even better is that this works not just for photo attachments, but also for photos shared through links to sites like Flickr and SmugMug.

For sharing photos, we’ve gone a step further and helped to break through the limits of past email. Increasingly, photos are larger and larger, and yet sending big email attachments can clog the inboxes of your friends and family. With Hotmail, we’ve combined the simplicity of sending photos through email with the power of Windows Live SkyDrive so that you can send up to 200 photos, each up to 50 MB in size, all in a single email. You can send all your vacation photos at once without worrying about attachment limits. Your photos are effortlessly transformed into an online album and your recipients will get a gorgeous email that lets them see all the photos no matter what email service they're using. They can view a slide show, download some or all of the photos, make comments, tag their friends, and even add their own photos. If you’re using Windows, you can even download the photos directly into Windows Live Photo Gallery for advanced photo editing and management made easy.

Documents. Documents work just like photos. If you receive a document, you can now open it with the full power of the new Office Web Apps, right in Hotmail. Just click and view. Just as you do with photos, you can send up 200 Office documents of up to 50 MB each. Send PowerPoint presentations embedded with videos, Word documents rich with images, and more.

With the new Hotmail, you can attach an Office document to an email and have it stored on SkyDrive. Hotmail then sends the document via SkyDrive, so that you – and the people you send it to – can access it from anywhere regardless of whether they use a PC or Mac, have Office installed, use Hotmail or don't, or have smaller attachment limitations than the 10 GB per message allowed by Hotmail. No more worrying about whether that document is stored on the computer you have with you, the computer you use at the library at your office, in your dorm room, or elsewhere.

You can also start working with these documents using Office on your PC and have your changes automatically saved back to SkyDrive. SkyDrive will also track and store older versions of the document so that you can revert to prior versions if you want to.

Shipping updates, social updates, photos, and videos. Thanks to the many fantastic partners we’re working with, people using Hotmail can save time and get more done right in the individual messages they receive, whether they're connecting to someone on LinkedIn, watching a video sent from YouTube or Hulu, or tracking a shipping notification. Suddenly, your email inbox is getting a lot richer and giving you new ways to be more productive online.

Get your mail, calendar, and contacts anywhere you go

Now that you’ve taken back your inbox and done more with your mail, we want to make sure you can get to it from anywhere. Hotmail supports push email on the web, PC, and now also on the mobile phone. Using Exchange ActiveSync, available on nearly 300 million phones, you can not only seamlessly synchronize Hotmail between your phone and the web, but you can also synchronize your calendar, contacts, and tasks.

We know not all phones are smart phones, and so we also built a mobile experience optimized for rich browsers and touch screens, so that your experience feels the same on all the latest phones. The mobile inbox supports filters, in-line message previews, HTML messages, offline e-mail viewing, conversation threading, the ability to flag messages, the option to show or hide message header details, and more. You can also manage invitations received via Hotmail, set reminders, aggregate multiple calendars, or share a calendar with friends and family, and do it all from your phone's web browser.

And there’s a whole lot more….

In this post we covered a few highlights of the new Hotmail and in follow-up posts we’ll go into more depth on other areas that we invested in, including enhanced account protection, full-session SSL, multiple email accounts, subfolders, contact management, and ever-growing storage.

The new Hotmail

The way people “do email” has changed a lot and continues to evolve. We designed the new Hotmail with this evolution in mind, so you can easily get the clutter out of your inbox, save time getting through your email, and view and edit photos and Office documents in your browser. In the coming weeks, we’ll start rolling out the new Hotmail broadly to our customers. You can also learn more about the upcoming Hotmail release at www.hotmailpreview.com.

We built Hotmail for you and the way you work today. We look forward to sharing this with all of you soon and getting your feedback!

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager for Windows Live Hotmail

Unfortunately, we’ve seen some issues with using Hotmail on the new Apple iPad. Specifically, composing and replying to an email is not working for some of our users.

Rest assured that we’re working with Apple to understand the issues, and we’ll fix them as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we have directed all iPad traffic to our mobile Hotmail website. Alternatively, you can set up the iPad email client to use POP to download your Hotmail.

Thank you,

Mike Schackwitz
Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail team

Update: With the release of Exchange ActiveSync for Hotmail, we recommend that customers with an iPad use its built-in email client to access Hotmail. For setup instructions, see this Windows Live Solution Center article on ActiveSync Setup for Hotmail.

Today we released an optional update for Wave 3 of the Windows Live Essentials suite in all 48 languages. This is a minor release that updates Windows Live Messenger, Mail, Family Safety, Writer, and Sync. You can install it from http://download.live.com, or through Microsoft Update as an optional update. While this is our last planned update for Wave 3, we will continue to support this release for the foreseeable future as it will be the last version that supports Windows XP.

This is a minor release with a small set of targeted bug fixes and minor changes. Even though most users will not run into the issues we addressed, we felt they were important to fix. This update also contains a small set of changes to ensure that Essentials supports new advances coming in Wave 4.

Rest assured, we’re continuing to work hard on Wave 4 and are in the final stretches. This update is a first and important step in that direction.

Arthur de Haan

Director, Windows Live Test and System Engineering

Update: Apologies for having left Writer off of the list of updated programs earlier. A small bug fix for Writer is also included in this update.  - Arthur

Update 2,  5/14/10: I want to elaborate a little bit more on some comments I’m seeing here about issues with the webcam feature. Here’s a little background.

The next version of Windows Live Messenger, releasing globally in the coming months, features two-way calling with high quality audio and high-definition video. This enhancement required significant changes in the audio and video stack used across all of our Windows Live services. This week’s Wave 3 update (called “QFE3”) upgrades the current release of Messenger with the new stack. As part of this upgrade, we are retiring one-way webcam functionality.

We never take the decision lightly to remove a feature, but we think that the improvements in performance and call quality for Wave 3 customers and the addition of high-definition video for Wave 4 customers made this the right decision.

These are exciting times to be working on an email product. This is perhaps surprising, given that email has been with us since the very first days of the Internet. It is one of the most ubiquitous and well understood communication technologies, right up there with the telephone and the (snail mail) postal service. One could be forgiven for assuming that all the problems inherent in this communication method have been solved already.

Yet email has been evolving to meet our growing communications needs since day one, and the innovation continues apace. Just as we've been working hard on Hotmail improvements (see Mike’s post), we also continue to invest heavily in our client email program Windows Live Mail, part of our Windows Live Essentials suite of products.

Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail was formerly known as just Windows Mail, and even more formerly known as Outlook Express (…yep, we just love renaming things to keep you on your toes :) ). It’s a very capable email application that can connect to most web-based email accounts including Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, and many others. It also includes a full-featured calendar that syncs with http://calendar.live.com.

Windows Live Mail

Yes, people still use email applications

Recently, web email has undergone a lot of innovation. Web email properties like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and Outlook Web Access have rapidly expanded their features and capabilities to the point where they've become the primary way that many users connect to their email.

Yet PC-based applications like Microsoft Office Outlook and our own Windows Live Mail are still widely used, and provide a set of distinct advantages that still resonate with users. Email remains the second most common activity on a new PC – right behind surfing the web. In fact, our research tells us that 70% of Windows users expect to get an email program on their new PC.

So, what draws all those people to prefer email applications to web-based mail?

The power of offline access

Reading and composing mail offline is a fairly common activity for laptop and mobile users. It’s super critical to be able to look up something in your mail from wherever you are, without having to hunt down a Wi-Fi hotspot or Ethernet jack. Applications like Outlook and Windows Live Mail allow you to read, compose, and manage your mail and calendar locally, and then sync everything back up the next time you reconnect.

Perhaps surprisingly, using an e-mail application can be preferable even for a fully-connected desktop PC. This is because you get a dedicated window for your email that isn’t sharing a frame with your browser. The window has its own icon in the Windows taskbar, it notifies you whenever new mail arrives, and your data is saved locally and not subject to network glitches, etc. My wife has been a Hotmail user for years but had never tried Windows Live Mail. Two years ago, I set up Windows Live Mail for her on her desktop PC, and she’s never gone back. She much prefers it to visiting the Hotmail website, and keeps Windows Live Mail running all day.

The power of local processing

Email applications still have an edge when composing long email messages. If you use an application like Windows Live Mail, you get used to simple things like rich formatting options, auto-saved drafts, on-the-fly spell checking, and the ability to paste images into a message, inline with your text.

Photos are especially important — the vast majority of photos are still exchanged via email. Windows Live Mail offers photo email – instead of attaching large photos directly to your message, which can take up a lot of bandwidth when sending, and may even bounce back, you can instead compose a photo email, which automatically uploads your photos to SkyDrive, and attaches smaller thumbnail images to your message. When your friend receives your photo email, they can click on a thumbnail photo, and are taken to a rich web photo viewer, where they can enjoy a full screen slide show, add comments, and download the images they want.

Mail applications are also better at managing large amounts of email. They can use more powerful local views that scroll faster and typically work more efficiently than they do in web-based mail. For example, you can easily select all the mail in a huge folder in Windows Live Mail and move it wherever you want, without having to select a bunch of check boxes or having to click through multiple pages. What's more, with an installed email program, you get the added power of your Windows desktop: you can do things like search your email directly from the Windows Start menu, or drag content from one email message to another.

Managing all your accounts in one place

Today, the average PC user manages 3 email accounts. Windows Live Mail helps you connect to all your email accounts and manage them in one place. Even if you don't have a Hotmail account, you can still use Windows Live Mail to check Gmail and other webmail services. You can even reply to mail sent to one account from another one, and drag messages from one account to another.

So what’s next?

For our upcoming release of Windows Live Mail, we have a great set of features planned that deepen all of these key experiences across the board.  I’m really itching to share more details with you, and to get the beta out where you all can try things out.

Our focus in the new release is on making it much easier for people to manage large volumes of email, send photos in a beautifully composed photo email messages, and organize their time with the calendar. You'll also see Windows Live Mail integrated more seamlessly with Windows and the rest of the Windows Live Essentials. And the interface is evolving to look and work much more like other email clients that you may be familiar with: Outlook and Outlook Express. Stay tuned for more as we gear up for the beta!

Piero Sierra
Group Program Manager
Windows Live Messenger and Mail