Congratulations.. Hotmail Team's efforts paid back.. I specifically like the wordings of PC Mag - "If you've moved to Gmail because your friends have told you it's the cool new choice, take another look at the current version of Hotmail. You'll be surprised." Only disappointment to me is that I have still not got the new Hotmail version...

Hotmail and SkyDrive are definitely two of the very best web apps. Kudos for improving it continually.

Congrats! Hotmail is definitley the best web app! It's a shame that Google Docs was second, not SkyDrive. Thanks to the Hotmail team for providing the best email service ever!

@hotmail team: Great applause for your efforts and making it #1. Now, you have to ensure that you remain #1 by continuously improving Hotmail. I personally feel that much can be done to improve Hotmail. Although it is still the best. But the heart greeds even more. Now, you have to make even more efforts because with awards come the responsibility.

I agree with @controlz that it is a shame that Google Docs were second instead of skydrive or Office Web Apps.

Once again Kudos for the Hotmail Team.

Congratulations!!  but.... why does it happen so often that new mail appears, but is un-openable?

This is off topic, but since Hotmail has had a lot of improvements lately, is there any chance that Hotmail Calendar could be improved? For example, it really, really needs a search function, and speed improvements would be useful (as would right click menus). The recent update with reminders was good, but Calendar could still do with a bit of work.

Thanks for providing the best email service ever!

Hotmail is great .but it gets slow sometimes .I can get to my inbox fairly quickly but when I click on an email nothing happens for a few seconds .this usually happens for the first one I click others ;Ok.

Thanks for all the kind words (and thanks for all the tweets!).  The team here very much appreciates hearing from this community - praise, feedback, criticisms - all of it.

@RhodesianAlways - will try to follow-up with you offline on your issue.  thanks!

Nice! Congrats, Hotmail!

@RhodesianAlways. Sorry to hear you're having issues opening email. Can you try turning on SSL as the default setting to see if that fixes the issue? Go here: account.live.com/summarypage.aspx >Connect with HTTPS>Use HTTPS automatically. We're working on address the rare "Can't Open" issue in other ways, but let me know if that works for you.

@Various Commenters... We're glad you're excited to get the upgrade with all the new features. You should see the new functionality very shortly. Our time frame for roll out is driven by ensuring that we'll have maximimum quality for our users. It's not schedule driven. We're evaluating how we can deal with the tension between "announcing" and "roll out schedule" more elegantly in the feature. All that said, barring any major issues, you should all have a nice holiday gift of new Hotmail features before the new year.

Please implement something like Gmail's canned response (gmailblog.blogspot.com/.../new-in-labs-canned-responses.html). Also, for .xps file type please bring View Online feature in Hotmail/SkyDrive and support .xps in WP natively. Thank you!

Please implement something like Gmail's canned response (gmailblog.blogspot.com/.../new-in-labs-canned-responses.html). Also about the xps extension; please provide the View Online option for xps documents in Hotmail and SkyDrive and its native support in Windows Phone.

Redesign Hotmail with the Metro UI goodness & it's going to be super awesome!

Congratulations!

Ofcourse Microsoft is the best in the world, Congs. to Hotmail, I use hotmail for 5 years...

Hotmail now offers two great features, one is the email alias, with which we can add up to 5 email IDs to the primary ID, another feature is that we can add up to 10 recovery email addresses in Account Settings. After setting up all of these, I find a problem: when I compose an email, Hotmail allows me to select a "From address" from a drop list. I thought only the primary ID and the five aliases should be included. But in my list, there are 16 addresses in the list, i.e., the ten recovery email addresses are also included. Is there a way to remove those addresses?

Re: what spring said (and as slightly off-topic): although I *love* the fact that Hotmail added aliases -- a feature I have long wanted Hotmail to implement -- I believe the information regarding the creation of them has been less than complete.  E.g. read this windows help page (windowslivehelp.com/solution.aspx).  Then read this fairly short thread regarding how many aliases one may create -- or more to the point, how many times in one year one may go through the alias-creating process (windowslivehelp.com/thread.aspxthreadid=dbf541aa-9c5c-43c2-8ca7-80d2787d6e38).  

My situation is exactly that: I created aliases, later deleted some and intended to replace them with others (assuming I could have a maximum of 5), but found out differently (as the thread mentions).

Great feature  :-)   but unhelpful information.  :-(

Oops.  It appears my link to the "added/deleted too many aliases" thread didn't work properly.  Let me try it once more:

windowslivehelp.com/thread.aspx

How about adding feature to let you copy email addresses from "To", "CC", "BCC" fields? One may need to copy all the email addresses from "To" field to "CC field, or vice-versa, or copy all email addresses to some place else. Currently you cannot copy email addresses because each one is in a box of its own.