You may have heard about a plug-in announced yesterday by Google. Our friends on the Office Web Apps team have a great blog post that explains our approach to connecting Office to the cloud using SkyDrive, whether you use Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010 or Office for Mac. Once you upload your Office documents to SkyDrive, you can access them anywhere and share with anyone – without making unexpected changes to the formatting of your document. 

Omar Shahine 
Group Program Manager, Windows Live

As we shared alongside Google on September 24 of last year, online account hijacking continues to grow across all email services, regardless of provider. To help protect our Hotmail customers, we’ve introduced a number of new features and technologies to safeguard accounts, including new methods of proving ownership like single-use codes and trusted PCs, trusted senders in the inbox, full-session SSL encryption, and more. And at a broader level, Microsoft also continues to hunt down cyber-criminals and illegal botnets that generate billions of spam messages daily, and shut them down.

Most people know that banks and credit card companies monitor usage patterns for suspicious activity -- and many people have had their financial institutions briefly suspend their accounts and contact them to double-check account activity and ensure the rightful owner is still in charge.

At Hotmail, we also monitor for strange activity (like sending a lot of email that is reported as spam) and contact our customers if we see issues. And in our network of over 1 billion email accounts, unfortunately, a few customers run into this problem every day.

If this happens to you, here’s how you’ll know.

• The next time you sign in to Hotmail or one of our other websites, you will be asked to complete a few simple steps to verify your identity, change your password (as a precaution), and then double check all of your information to ensure that nobody else has changed anything without your knowledge. We call this the account recovery wizard, and in addition to verifying that you are you, we also encourage you to add extra pieces of information to your account to make it even more secure (we call these “proofs”). Adding a mobile phone number, alternate email, or trusted PC makes it harder for criminals to access your account and easier for you to recover if they do.
• If you access Hotmail using a program like Outlook, Windows Live Mail, or software on your mobile phone, you will see an error (usually that there is a problem with your username or password). You will need to log in online at www.hotmail.com to see if your account has a problem and access the account recovery wizard. If you see your inbox, then you weren’t compromised and can continue as normal.

If you do find out that your account has been compromised, don’t worry. We’ll fix it. Below is a video showing the account recovery wizard and then another demonstrating how you can add proofs to your account to help prevent this in the future.

Most people should be able to recover their account in just a few minutes by answering a few questions or using their alternative email address or mobile phone. If you run into issues, we do have support agents online to help at https://www.windowslivehelp.com/PasswordReset.aspx. But it’s usually only a few minutes to recover your account yourself – so try that first before asking support to help.

Most often, the source of the compromise is a virus or malware that record keystrokes to steal passwords. Keep in mind that even if your PC is safe, your friend’s PC (or that PC at the hotel on a business trip) may not be.

The good news is that you can protect yourself! Be sure to update your virus software on your PCs (you can download free antivirus software at the Microsoft Security Essentials website), and when you use a PC that isn’t yours, consider logging in with a one-time code. For additional steps you should take to secure your account, please follow these steps from the Windows Live Hotmail Help Center.

When it comes to account security, Hotmail—and Microsoft—are dedicated to doing all we can to help protect your Hotmail account from thieves. While it’s fun and exciting to develop and launch new features that people on Hotmail love—like our integration with Office or Sweep—our number one priority is the security of your account.

Stay safe.

Eric Doerr
Group Program Manager, Windows Live ID

Today, Facebook chat is available to Hotmail customers worldwide, wherever Facebook is available.

When we first announced the ability to chat with Facebook friends from Hotmail, we were only able to offer this to customers in six regions. Since then, we’ve been working with Facebook to increase availability, and a few weeks ago, we announced that the feature was available globally through Messenger. Today this is available around the world through Hotmail too. 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.

Since announcing the availability of Facebook chat in Messenger worldwide two weeks ago, nearly 2.5 million more people connected their Facebook accounts to Windows Live, bringing the total to over 20 million customers. And with three out of four Hotmail customers using Facebook, we expect that many more people will want to take advantage of this feature, now that it’s available from your Hotmail inbox.

To try it out, first connect your Facebook account to Windows Live and make sure the “Chat with my Facebook friends in Messenger” box is checked to give your consent to Facebook. We’ll link your accounts (this may take a few minutes), and you can start a chat from Hotmail just by clicking on the name of a Facebook contact. If this doesn’t work right away, sign out and back in again, and you should be good to go.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail

For all of you who have been following this blog and using Hotmail regularly, you know that we’ve made a lot of updates recently – helping you remove the clutter in your inbox, making it easier to share photos, bringing the power of Office into your inbox and making email more interactive.

We’re very humbled that yesterday, PC Magazine gave Hotmail their Editors’ Choice award. Thank you, PC Magazine, for the recognition!

And to all of you who use Hotmail daily, we want to thank you for your support – we couldn’t be where we are without you. There’s a lot more coming from Hotmail, and we look forward to delivering it to you.

Thank you!

Dharmesh Mehta
Director, Windows Live Product Management

Starting today, you can create and manage multiple email aliases from a single Hotmail account. Together with features that we introduced in November that let you use Hotmail with any existing email address, 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.

The email address a person uses is a big part of their online identity. The average person maintains three different email addresses in order to organize different types of email, maintain different personas, or keep junk mail away from a primary email address. So there are many good reasons that people want multiple email addresses, but maintaining multiple accounts, with different user names and passwords that require you to check multiple inboxes, is inefficient. With today’s update, Hotmail helps you save time by making it easier to manage your current and future email addresses in one place.

Aliases

Hotmail (and many other email services) already allow you to just add a plus sign (‘+’) and a descriptive word to the first part of your email address. For instance, if your email address was doctor-smith@live.com and you wanted to create an alias for online shopping, you could use doctor-smith+shopping@live.com. Email sent to this alias will still be delivered to your inbox or to a particular folder. This can help with managing different types of incoming email. In addition to the plus feature, we’ve also released Sweep to help manage this type of incoming email traffic. 

However, with the plus addresses that many services offer, it’s still very easy to determine your actual email address and there are times when you simply don’t want to give out any part of your real email address – that’s where our new alias feature helps you out. 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. 

Let’s say you’re in the market for a new car. There are a bunch of websites that will email you price quotes, sales alerts, etc. During your car search, these messages are helpful, but once you’re done, they become clutter that can be difficult to stop. By using an alias on these websites instead of your main email address, you can avoid this. And when you’re done, just turn the alias off, ensuring future unwanted messages that are sent to that alias don’t land in your inbox.

You might also be concerned that your address could be sold to other companies or could result in a large amount of new email that you don’t want or doesn’t belong in the same place as your regular email. Or maybe you want an address that’s better suited to your hard-core gaming persona rather than your normal, professional one. Starting today, you can add up to five aliases 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. 

With the option to use Hotmail with any email address and the ability to easily add aliases, we look forward to hearing how you’re better managing and securing your online identity.

Dharmesh Mehta
Director, Windows Live Product Management