It’s nearing the end of January, and that’s a good time to think about those New Year’s resolutions. A year ago, you might have called us crazy, but a lot has changed in the last 12 months and as a result, there are now many reasons why you may want to consider leaving Gmail and giving Hotmail a try. As we’ve talked about on this blog, Hotmail’s come a long way and we definitely think it’s worth giving Hotmail another look. We’ve started to see some folks make the move from Gmail to Hotmail, and so we want to share with you how to do this.

From what we’ve heard, some of the top reasons why people are making the move from Gmail to Hotmail include:

• Hotmail & Facebook work well together. You can update your Facebook status, chat with Facebook friends, view their updates, and comment right from your Hotmail inbox. You can't do this from Gmail.
• You can easily share lots of photos and large attachments. Hotmail lets you share hundreds of photos or other files in one message using the integrated online storage from SkyDrive. You can't do this in Gmail.
• Hotmail works great with Office. Using the Office Web Apps, Hotmail lets you view and edit Office docs for free right in your inbox. Gmail doesn’t work well with Office.
• Hotmail lets you get a handle on graymail. With customizable categories and scheduled sweeps, you can quickly clean up things like newsletters, social updates, and daily deals so you only see the mail that really matters to you. Gmail doesn’t have Sweep.

Here’s how to make the switch in three easy steps

1. Create a Hotmail account. If you don’t already have one, you need to create a Hotmail account. The best way to do this is to get a new email address either @hotmail.com or @live.com. Or, if you already have an email address you want to keep using, you can keep using it and sign up here. You don’t have to use our domain.
2. Import your old messages from Gmail. You’ll probably want to keep your old email and contacts so we’ve made it simple to bring them in. TrueSwitch is an easy tool which will import your email and contacts and forward any new email to Hotmail for 90 days. Go to the TrueSwitch site and follow the steps there. When you sign back in to Hotmail, you’ll notice that it’s beginning to import your emails (this could take a few hours if you have a lot of emails to bring over).
3. Connect your Gmail account. This step is optional, but if you want to make sure you receive future messages from Gmail, you can have Hotmail automatically get all new emails that are sent to your old Gmail account. These are the steps to connect your accounts:

a. In your inbox, click Options and then More options.

b. Click Sending/receiving email from other accounts.

c. Click Add an email account.

d. Provide your Gmail account details.

That’s it—you’re ready to go! And you can add other accounts too—from Yahoo, AOL, or other providers. Here’s a quick video showing you how to do this:

So start the New Year fresh with a new inbox from Hotmail, built to be the best email service in the world. And for those of you making the switch from Gmail, let us know what you think.

Dharmesh Mehta

Director - Windows Live Product Management

We think it’s critical that our customers can use Hotmail from any device they choose. So, in addition to making Hotmail work great on devices running Windows, we’ll continue to invest in great experiences on other major device platforms. The recent release of iOS5 and our Hotmail application for Android has made it even easier to use Hotmail on those devices, and the result has been over 12 million active Hotmail users on iOS and over 3 million active users of our Android application.

The Hotmail team is happy to announce that our Kindle Fire application for Hotmail is now live in the Kindle store and ready for download for free. The Hotmail Kindle app gives you several advantages over the native Kindle Fire mail application. Whereas the native Kindle application simply downloads your mail via POP3, with the new Hotmail app you can sync all your mail, contacts, folders, and subfolders via the more robust Exchange Active Sync protocol. Because the Kindle Fire uses a different implementation of Android, we needed to make some updates to our previous Hotmail app for Android to ensure it worked well. Now that we’ve finished the work and the app is ready, we’re excited to give customers a great Hotmail experience on the Kindle Fire. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Thanks,

David Law

Director – Hotmail Product Management

A few months ago, we shared a few challenges that customers have with today’s personal cloud storage services. College students in particular have unique needs that today’s services do not satisfy. While we continue to improve SkyDrive to meet their needs, today’s SkyDrive can already help students work together more efficiently. To spread the word, we’re showcasing what students can do with SkyDrive and Office, and we’re sponsoring a $50K Collaboration Challenge for students at 10 universities across the U.S. who are participating in business plan competitions.

This blog post includes a few power tips and FAQs to help you get the most out of SkyDrive and Office for full-powered collaboration.

The problem

Let’s say you're working on a business plan competition (or another group project) with a few other people. Your teammates are across campus, across town or even across the country. Some use PCs. Some use Macs. You want to put your best foot forward with a compelling pitch deck, smart business plan, and sound financial analysis. How can you easily work together and create something great?

You could use web-based apps like Google Docs. While they may work well for simple tasks, they may not have the features you need to create professional documents. You can also have formatting issues when you move between these apps and Office. You could also use a “file cloud” like Dropbox, but these tools aren’t really designed for collaboration, and they don’t let you work simultaneously with others on a document.

Faced with these choices, many people decide to work independently and email files back and forth. This makes it hard to know if you’re working on the latest version of a document, and sometimes you can run into attachment limits. It also can take a lot of time to piece together different Word documents or PowerPoint presentations from multiple email messages.

How SkyDrive can help

With SkyDrive, you have a better option. You can store all your files in one place, so everyone can access the latest version. You can also use free Office Web Apps for basic editing from any browser.

But what most people don’t know is that SkyDrive and Office Web Apps integrate with the Office apps installed on your PC or Mac so you can work together on documents in the cloud right from your desktop apps. With the right setup, you can work together on a Word doc or PowerPoint presentation with your teammates at the same time.

Working this way, your team gets the powerful authoring and formatting tools that you’re used to in Microsoft Office, while also being able to take advantage of cloud-based collaboration. Everyone can work from the latest version and even work on the doc at the same time. You won’t have to convert your document into a different format that could lead to formatting problems.

Also with tools like OneNote Web App and PowerPoint embedding, SkyDrive can save your team time by being the one place to brainstorm, create, collaborate and publish.

Power tips

Here are 7 tips for full-powered collaboration in the cloud—across PCs and Macs. Please also see the FAQs at the end of the blog post.

Tip 1: Add SkyDrive.com to your desktop for quick access

If you have a PC, you can pin SkyDrive to your Windows 7 taskbar using Internet Explorer 9 for quick access to files and sharing options.

If you have a Mac, you have a few different options. Apps like Fluid or Automator bring SkyDrive to your Dock along with a nice SkyDrive icon (download one here). However, using these can interfere with the plugin that SkyDrive needs to open Office apps on your Mac (see the FAQ below). We recommend a simpler approach:

1. Use Safari or Firefox to sign in to SkyDrive.com. (Select “Keep me signed in”)
2. Drag the SkyDrive icon in your browser address bar down to the right side of your Dock.

Tip 2: Create one space for the team that’s easy to find

There are two ways to create a shared space for your team on SkyDrive. You can create a SkyDrive group or you can share a SkyDrive folder with team members.

With the latest sharing updates, sharing a folder is a better option for many projects, particularly ones that are short-lived. Now you can go from creation, to collaboration, to publishing—keeping your files in one place without extra versions.

To get the most out of the experience:

• Use subfolders to keep all your group’s files organized in one shared folder. If you organize files this way, your teammates can easily access all files by clicking the parent folder within the “Shared” section of their SkyDrive.

• Set permissions individually for files or subfolders, if, for example, you need others outside your team to contribute to a part of the project. Once you’re ready to share your project with the world, you can share any file—like your pitch deck—with others. You can even feature it on your blog, by selecting any file on SkyDrive and clicking Embed.

Tip 3: Capture meeting notes, brainstorming notes, and to-do’s more efficiently than email

SkyDrive works with OneNote so you can organize notes and brainstorm in a virtual notebook that’s shared with your entire team. Instead of sifting through old email threads, everyone can get up to speed on the project history in one place.

To start, create a new notebook using OneNote Web App in your shared folder. Then, everyone on your team can easily access it from that folder.

OneNote Web App works great across Mac and PC, and you can easily access it along with the rest of your shared files from your SkyDrive bookmark. If you have OneNote 2010 on your PC, sync your notebook locally to work offline and use additional features like screenshot capture, inking and more. You can also access your notes on a Windows Phone, iPhone, or iPad.

Tip 4: Access SkyDrive docs right from Word, Excel or PowerPoint—online or offline

Once your team is up and running, you may find that you’re working on a couple of documents frequently, such as your pitch deck or financial model.

With Windows 7 and Office 2010, if you’ve opened these documents from SkyDrive at least once, you can then pin them to your taskbar just by right-clicking Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Then you can edit and automatically save changes back to the cloud.

Also, within Word, Excel or Word 2010, you can use the File/Recent menu for even more pinning options. You can pin additional files, as well as the entire shared folder.

If you have a Mac, you can access any SkyDrive document that you’ve opened recently from the File/Open Recent menu of the Office app that you’re using.

And if you’re offline, you may still be able to access your SkyDrive docs. On your PC, run Microsoft Office 2010 Upload Center from the start menu or from the tray. You can view recently uploaded files that have been cached for offline use. On the Mac, access Upload Center through the Finder.

Tip 5: Use Word co-authoring to ensure your team’s plan flows nicely

If you and your teammates use Word 2010 for PC, Word 2011 for Mac, or Word Web App, you can work together on the same Word document on SkyDrive at the same time. If your team’s style is to “divide and conquer”, co-authoring will help your team see the paper as it comes together, so each person can make sure that their piece fits with what the rest of the team is doing. You can even see everyone who is working on a doc at a given time.

To get the most out of the experience, use Track Changes for edit rounds. Track Changes lets you review any change your teammates make to the document. If you turn on Track Changes, keep in mind that you won’t be able to edit the document using Word Web App until you accept all of the changes.

Tip 6: Avoid last minute PowerPoint assembly with co-authoring

SkyDrive works with PowerPoint 2010 for PC and PowerPoint 2011 for Mac so you can work together on the same PowerPoint at the same time. This can be a huge time saver compared to emailing around individual slides, and it lets you keep your formatting consistent. To take advantage of this:

• Populate your presentation with blank slides that chart your presentation’s “story.”
• Assign slides to members of your team, so each person knows exactly where to contribute. As each person periodically saves their presentation, they’ll automatically get updates from the rest of the team.
• Keep Excel and PowerPoint files together and linked on SkyDrive. Then, if one member of your team updates the Excel workbook, you can automatically refresh the corresponding chart in PowerPoint—without having to provide any additional copying, pasting, or emailing.

Tip 7: Use version history to avoid disasters

For Office documents that you edit online or on your PC, SkyDrive keeps track of different versions automatically, storing the last 25 versions online. These additional versions do not count towards your storage limit on SkyDrive.

Versions are really helpful because they can recover your file from a bad change, and they also let you go back in time and see how far your project has come!

Click on any Office document to view its version history, and then choose to restore or delete any version. If you decide to restore a previous version, SkyDrive will not overwrite your current file. Instead, it will take a snapshot of your current file and save it as another version.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a Hotmail account to use SkyDrive?

No. If you use Gmail or another account, you can easily sign up for an account at SkyDrive.com using your existing email address. Once you sign up, you can add contacts from Gmail or Facebook for easier sharing.

Why can’t I open docs from SkyDrive.com using Office apps on my PC or Mac?

We’re working hard to make sure SkyDrive and Office Web Apps are built using HTML5 and modern web standards to work across browsers.

But to be able to open cloud-based files with Word, Excel, or PowerPoint on your PC or Mac, SkyDrive requires a browser plugin that’s currently available for Internet Explorer and Firefox on the PC or Safari and Firefox on the Mac. If you use these browsers and still have issues opening docs, here’s a quick way to troubleshoot the problem:

1. Check if a plugin named “SharePoint…” or “Microsoft Office 2010…” is installed and enabled. If you have a recent version of Office, the plugin should already be installed. Here’s how to check for add-ins on IE8, IE9, Firefox and Safari.
   If you don’t see the plugin, install a free trial of Office 2010 or Office 2011. This will automatically add the plugin to your browser. You may also need to install the Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant on Windows.
2. If you use OS X Lion or Snow Leopard, setup Safari to run in 32-bit mode.

NOTE: You need Office 2003, 2007 or 2010 on the PC or Office 2008 or Office 2011 on the Mac to open files from SkyDrive.

I can’t upload more than one file at a time to SkyDrive. What’s wrong?

You should be able to. If you have Silverlight installed and use IE or Safari for Mac, you can upload up to 200 files at the same time. If you use Firefox or Chrome, you can drag and drop multiple files from your desktop to the folder of your choice.

Listening to your feedback

We hope these tips are helpful for any type of group work. And for students participating in a business plan competition, we encourage your team to try SkyDrive, check out these helpful tips / templates from Guy Kawasaki, and enter our $50K Collaboration Challenge.

We’re constantly working to improve the SkyDrive experience. We’d love to hear from you, whether you have additional tips, suggestions or just want to share with us something that you’ve created using SkyDrive.

Anand Babu

Product Manager

SmartScreen®—it’s not just for spam anymore. The latest release of Hotmail uses Microsoft SmartScreen to automatically identify more than a billion newsletters every day. Since newsletters account for more than a quarter of all the mail in a typical inbox, having them automatically categorized is a big time-saver.

This post will walk us through how we took SmartScreen and trained it to identify not just spam, but also specific kinds of graymail—newsletters—to help customers stop spam and manage graymail.

When inbox spam was at 30%, our job was really clear—our enemy, clever as he remains, was impossible to miss. We made huge investments in SmartScreen and reduced spam to historic lows of less than 3%.

With spam at manageable levels, we began looking at the rest of the inbox, and what we found was pretty surprising.

We could easily tell which messages were person-to-person, and we identified spam getting past our filters. The majority of what was left was something we refer to as graymail, and when thinking about how to deal with graymail, it became clear that the fundamental problem wasn’t just which things to accept or reject. Unlike spam, which everyone wants to be rid of, there is no general agreement on how to deal with graymail.

We believe the solution lies in delivering features that enable you to manage your graymail. With that in mind we introduced powerful new tools, including Sweep, Scheduled Cleanup, special views of the inbox, and other enhancements to put you in charge.

However, as cool as these tools are, they require maintenance to stay current and rely on you to identify the messages to be managed. We know you’ve got a busy life, so we wanted to do more.

Automatically classifying graymail

The basic idea is to identify what a message is before you see it, and to take special actions on the message where it makes sense to do so. At its core, this is not a new concept. SmartScreen already classifies and flags messages as spam and/or malicious and tells the message delivery system how to handle the message.

For example, based on the threat posed by a given message, SmartScreen may decide to:

• Deliver a message from someone you don’t know to the inbox, but allow you to decide whether you want to view the entire message[1].
• Mark a message as spam and deliver it to the Junk folder.
• Reject a message that contains dangerous code or is from a known bad sender.

We learned a lot in the fight against spam, and since the infrastructure was already in place, it made a lot of sense to apply those lessons and our new tools to graymail management. By automatically categorizing graymail, we can make Sweep, Scheduled Cleanup, and all the other cool new tools even better. The big question was where to start.

When we looked at the graymail portion of the inbox (a whopping 82%!), a few things immediately jumped out. Social networking has really become a big part of everyone’s lives in the last couple of years, and the email notifications associated with Facebook, Twitter, and other popular sites have become a large part of people’s inboxes as well. Fortunately, the most prevalent senders in that category are well-known, don’t change that often, and are easy to detect, so we shipped the Social Updates view in the last release of Hotmail.

However, we knew there was a bigger prize, a segment of email so pervasive and chatty that it completely dwarfed social updates—to the tune of 50% of some folks’ inboxes!

Every day the average person’s inbox is flooded with messages from thousands of different retailers, clubs, societies, and schools, or with coupons, deals, and notifications from deal aggregators talking about all the exciting things that people need to be buying, doing, or seeing. We refer to this subset of graymail as “newsletters.”

Newsletters are unlike notifications from Facebook or Twitter, which always come from the same email address, always look the same way, and mostly contain the same content. Newsletters are different. Newsletters can be extremely diverse. Anyone can send newsletters, and newsletters can include any format or content they like.

Dealing with that diversity meant we needed to take a different approach than the approach we took for social updates. And, because that diversity is a trait shared by other categories of graymail, we wanted to build something that could grow beyond newsletters.

Building the newsletter filter

To get Hotmail to identify newsletters for us, we began by making a list of newsletter characteristics and built a piece of software to extract them from incoming emails. This list forms the model of what makes newsletters different from all other mail and includes three aspects: presence of the List-Unsubscribe header, the sending email address, and what gets shown to the user.

With a clear definition of what we considered a newsletter, we created a reference set of about 10,000 messages that we classified as “newsletter” or “not a newsletter.” Think of the reference set as a test for our newsletter filter: the rate at which it correctly identifies newsletters defines its accuracy.

Using a technique called machine learning, we built a system that trained and adjusted the model until it reliably detected most of the newsletters in the reference set. Because the reference set was built from a completely random sample, we knew that the filter’s performance against it would very closely approximate “real world” performance. Once we were detecting most of the reference set’s newsletters, we began an internal pilot of the feature in September 2011—we call this “dogfooding.”

Eating dogfood

“Dogfooding,” the process of using our own employees to test new software using our real email accounts, was crucial to identifying and fixing problems with the filter. We provided the dogfood users with a way to report missed and incorrectly identified newsletters just as we do for the occasional spam message that gets through our filters. We spent several weeks analyzing the failures and adjusting the model until we’d worked out the known kinks.

For example, a major problem we identified early on was that financial services businesses tend to send all their mail from the same domain, and often have a lot of boilerplate language that closely resembles newsletters—even though they may not be. Rather than take the risk of filing away your bank statements, we decided it was better to leave these messages alone and trained the newsletter filter to ignore them.

How well does this work?

In general, spammers are pretty indiscriminate and don’t think too hard about whether to send you a ton of offers for Rolex watches, cheap loans, or pharmaceuticals. With minor differences, everyone gets pretty much the same spam. The interesting thing about graymail is that you accumulate it over time, based almost exclusively on what you do online, and so every inbox is different.

We designed the newsletter filter to perform well for the average person’s inbox: correctly identify most of the newsletters most of the time. But this doesn’t mean we didn’t aim high. Let’s look at the data. Most newsletters are sent out on weekdays; about 1.5B newsletters are sent per day; newsletters make up about half of all email delivered to our servers. This represents 73% of the newsletters in an average person’s inbox (36% of all their email), and when we think a message is a newsletter, we’re right 97% of the time.

Getting this right allows you to filter or sweep these messages quickly, which means you can spend more time reading and responding to email than reorganizing it.

Using Hotmail’s categorization tool, you can change the categorization of a message—for example, marking or unmarking it as a newsletter. This generates feedback that the newsletter filter learns from, so it’s able to overcome previous mistakes as well as stay on top of new newsletters. This means the rules set up to deal with newsletters will not just apply to old ones, but also to new newsletters created after you’ve refined the rules to deal with newsletters. The best part is that SmartScreen learns from what customers do with their newsletters, and everyone benefits as the filter gets smarter!

What’s next?

With the newsletter filter now in the hands of all our customers, we will continue adding new categories and features that enable you to get the most out of them. We’re investigating ways to more effectively present and manage email-based receipts, bank statements, and more. We hope the newsletter filter can be a helpful tool in your own war on graymail. We love getting your feedback, so let us know how it’s working for you, and, as always, Thanks for using Hotmail.

Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager Hotmail

[1] Note: We will be changing this for the better in an upcoming release. Hotmail will soon use domain reputation to decide which messages to “light up” by default, lessening the burden on customers.