Inside Windows Live

Shorter, more useful links with SDRV.MS

Omar Shahine — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:15:00 GMT

If you’re like most people, when you share files via SkyDrive you typically do so directly via email. This is one reason we built the connected address book, bringing together your friends’ addresses across Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Another benefit: when you share photos via email, your friends get a beautiful email with thumbnail previews.

Back in December, we added another way to share. You can get a link to any file or folder on SkyDrive and send that link to friends. You can choose to let friends edit or add files, or choose to make the link read-only. Since then, SkyDrive users have created over 13 million links—copying and pasting them into their favorite apps or services.

While this feature has been popular, we’ve also gotten a lot of feedback that our links are too long and too ugly. We agree!

Sharing with links just got a bit friendlier:

We’ve shortened our regular URLs by 40%. Our previous URLs didn’t even fit inside a Tweet! Oh the shame!
You can shorten them even further thanks to our new partnership with bitly and the new domain for shortened SkyDrive URLs: http://sdrv.ms
We’ve added OpenGraph support to our URLs so that when you paste them into places like Facebook, a nice thumbnail preview gets generated

Shorter links

As you can see in the Share dialog, there is a Shorten button

Shortening using our own custom domain

Clicking the button will result in a very short URL using the SDRV.MS domain

Support for OpenGraph for link previews

If you copy that URL to Facebook you’ll see a nicer preview

Stats on your short links

Since bitly powers the shortener, you also get great power features. For example, you can add a ‘+’ to the end of any short URL to see statistics. You can also generate a QR code for that URL by appending ’.qrcode’ to that URL.

We hope you enjoy these changes, and thanks for using SkyDrive!

Omar Shahine
Group Program Manager, SkyDrive.com

Six Tips to Make SkyDrive your Cloud Backpack

Anand Babu — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Earlier this year, we shared a few tips for students to work together with SkyDrive and Office on important projects—without compromising formatting or features. We heard great feedback and we look forward to sharing winners from our Collaboration Challenge soon!

Increasingly, we see students and teachers use services like SkyDrive to store everything in one place for easy sharing and access anywhere on campus. We call this your “cloud backpack”. In this post, Mark Grimaldi on the SkyDrive product marketing team will share a few tips to use SkyDrive this way.

- Anand Babu, Group Product Marketer, SkyDrive

If you’re a student, it’s the same routine every day. You gather everything you need—your notebook for class, binder full of handouts, readings or homework assignments, textbooks, laptop, smartphone and maybe even your tablet. And of course your power adapters. Then you stuff it all into your backpack—everything you think you might need throughout the day—because you may not be back home until it’s time for bed.

Surely, there must be a better way to have everything you might need without hauling it around with you everywhere you go.

Well, there is. With SkyDrive, you get a “cloud backpack” where you can store, create and access all of your documents, notes, photos or files from anywhere. Our new SkyDrive at School page shows how anyone can get started with a cloud backpack, but we wanted to share a few extra tips to help you go “all in.”

Tip #1: Upgrade your notebook and put it in the cloud

OneNote 2010 is a powerful note-taking application that’s great for school. With OneNote, you can organize your notes by your classes, instantly search through them, draw graphs or diagrams, and even record your lectures. If you’re not using OneNote yet, check out these tips on the OneNote Blog to get started.

To make OneNote even more useful for you, connect it to SkyDrive and try these suggestions:

Study from anywhere

By saving your notebook on SkyDrive, you can access it from any computer (even a Mac!) using the OneNote Web App. You can also study on-the-go since OneNote is also available on pretty much every mobile device.

To save your OneNote notebook to SkyDrive, just click File and then Share to save it on the web.

Copy things to OneNote

Whether for class or a research project, you can send printouts, screenshots or web clippings right to OneNote to stay organized.

Find a helpful website for your research paper? Just highlight what you want from Internet Explorer and right click Send to OneNote 2010 to insert it into your notebook. You can send a whole webpage, a paragraph or image. OneNote will even show where you copied the content from so you can easily cite and reference it later.

Have a PDF or some other file from your professor? You can Print directly to your OneNote notebook and save it next to your notes from the same lecture.

To take a snapshot of anything on your screen, press Windows + S on your keyboard. You can also drop and drag an entire file into OneNote from your desktop.

By default, OneNote always asks where you want new notes to go. You can set a default preference by clicking File, Options, and then Send to OneNote. If you select a notebook that’s synced to SkyDrive, you can rest assured that anything you send to OneNote will be available anywhere, automatically.

Share your notes with classmates without a photocopier

With all of your notes in the cloud, you can easily share them with your friends and classmates. From SkyDrive.com, just right click your notebook and select Share.

If you want, you can even give them access to your notebook so that they can add their own notes. Now everyone can work together in the same notebook, and studying for finals just got a little easier.

Tip #2: Never be without your important files

Odds are, you’re either working on an important project right now or will be shortly. Well, SkyDrive can help keep you more organized and make sure that you’re never without the files that you need.

When you install SkyDrive for Windows or Mac, you get a SkyDrive folder on your computer. Everything you save or copy there is automatically synced to your SkyDrive. So move your spreadsheets, downloaded articles, and everything else you’ve gathered. No matter what happens to your computer, you can easily get to your stuff from any web browser.

Tip #3: Work with Office anywhere

SkyDrive does more than store your files. It also works with free Office Web Apps so you can view, edit and print from any web browser.

If you’re working on a Word document on your laptop at the library and your battery dies, you can easily pick up right where you left off just by logging into SkyDrive.com at the computer lab. If you get inspired on the bus ride back home, you can update your document using the Office Hub on your Windows Phone. You can rest assured that your formatting remains intact.

Any changes you make will be waiting to sync when you plug in your computer back at your dorm room.

What’s more, SkyDrive also keeps track of the various versions of your Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. So don’t worry about renaming your files V1, V2… V14a. Just work in the documents saved in your SkyDrive folder and SkyDrive will take care of the rest.

Tip #4: Never leave something at home again

You’ve been there before. You’re at the computer lab ready to print out your paper and you forgot your USB drive. Or you’re away from your computer and you realize you didn’t email your TA your homework assignment. Or maybe you’ve just met someone at a company you’d like to work for and you want to send them your résumé, but you won’t be home for hours.

These aren’t a problem anymore. Even if you forget to put something in your SkyDrive folder—or never thought you’d need it there—you can still access it from any computer. SkyDrive for Windows lets you fetch any file on your personal computer (as long as it’s online) from SkyDrive.com.

Once you find that paper to print, you can click Copy to SkyDrive and use Word Web App to view, print and share.

Tip #5: Scan papers to SkyDrive using your phone

From handouts to class readings, old notes or recent assignments, you have so much paper to carry around and keep organized. Why not scan and upload everything to SkyDrive?

Use a smartphone app like Handyscan for Windows Phone (shown below) or Docscan for iPhone to create PDF versions of all of your handouts, homework, or even lecture notes from your friends. You can save the files directly to SkyDrive and they’ll be synced across your devices.

If you want to do more – like add comments or keep scans alongside class notes, you can import PDFs and other files into OneNote.

Tip #6: Access files on the go

USB drives are easily left behind. Emailing yourself documents makes it easy to lose track of the latest version or crowds your inbox.

With SkyDrive, you can access everything, all around campus, from any web browser. You can also use the SkyDrive app for Windows Phone, iPhone and iPad, or Android apps—no matter where you are.

Bringing a cloud backpack to every student and teacher

While we hope these tips are helpful, we know it will take some time before everyone upgrades to a “cloud backpack”. Here are a few ways you can help:

If you are a teacher, share class materials or class notes directly using SkyDrive. You can also provide feedback on assignments and papers through shared documents.

If you are a developer, use our APIs to integrate SkyDrive into applications that students use and love.

And if you are a student, what tips did we miss? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter how you’re using a cloud backpack today. We can help spread the word!

Mark Grimaldi,
Product Marketing Manager, SkyDrive

An exciting few days for personal cloud storage – and SkyDrive

Anand Babu — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:41:00 GMT

This week, we’ve seen a welcome update from Dropbox, a new chapter for SkyDrive and the long awaited emergence of Google Nessie. Is it only Wednesday?

We’re very encouraged by the response we’ve received this week, and it’s hard not to be pretty happy when we hear positive feedback on all of the improvements we’ve made and the value we provide vs. other solutions. But the most exciting thing for us has been the response from our customers. We’ve been thrilled to hear from you on Twitter and blogs, and we’ve had an overwhelming number of downloads of SkyDrive across Windows 8, Windows 7, iOS and Mac. We're listening to your feedback for the future, and we’ll keep adding storage and bandwidth as fast as we can. Thank you!

What do comparison charts leave out?

With this week’s events, it can be fun and useful to compare features across services. We’ve seen these charts across the web, and of course we recently updated our own chart.

However these comparisons often neglect one thing. Is each provider actually trying to build similar experiences? As we look at the category, we see our approach with SkyDrive is increasingly unique.

We don’t think people want another file cloud to manage. They don't want an app cloud tied to one browser, social network or ad network. They don't want yet another proprietary device cloud. People want a cloud that seamlessly connects their files to the apps and devices they use every day.

Over a billion people rely on Office apps and their Windows devices every day to create, capture and share from anywhere. That’s why we’re building personal cloud storage for our customers that works seamlessly with Office and Windows.

Of course we know Office and Windows customers have other devices and use other apps. We want them to enjoy SkyDrive too, so we’re working to make it available anywhere – directly and in partnership with developers.

As we do all of this, there should be no doubt that our business model is aligned with your interests.

A few things to try today

So how exactly will SkyDrive let you work seamlessly with Office and Windows from anywhere? We thought we’d share a few things you can try today.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint: Work across web and desktop, online or offline - no conversions, no compromises

With SkyDrive for Windows and Mac, you can easily work with documents using the Office apps you love – Word, Excel and PowerPoint – from anywhere. Unlike other services, you can do this without converting between formats or compromising on features. Below is a short video to demonstrate along with a few tips for collaboration.
OneNote: Capture notes, voice clips, scans and more on the go. Access and search later

Over the years, people have called OneNote a hidden gem. Thankfully more people are discovering it with the launch of OneNote for Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone. Use your phone to take notes, record voice clips, scan documents and sync them instantly to SkyDrive. Your stuff is pushed to OneNote 2010 on your PC where you can organize and search – even audio and images. You can share notebooks with your spouse, friends or teams who can use OneNote Web App - free.
Fetch files in Windows: Turn your PC into a private cloud to access any file, not just what’s in the cloud

Moving files to the cloud offers many advantages – particularly for sharing and collaboration. However, you shouldn’t have to upload everything just to access it anywhere. With “fetch”, SkyDrive works seamlessly with your Windows PC so you can access any file from anywhere. You can even stream videos. Windows transcodes your video automatically to fit your connection.
Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Every app connects to the cloud, no setup required

With SkyDrive for Windows, the cloud is another folder on your desktop. Any existing Windows app that can access the file system can now access SkyDrive. SkyDrive for Windows 8 also brings a seamless cloud experience to new Windows 8 apps. This opens up new possibilities, for example, using SkyDrive together with apps available now in the Windows Store like Mail, Docstoc and Skitch.

Please try these out today, share your feedback – and tell your friends. In the coming months, you’ll see SkyDrive continue to bring seamless personal cloud storage to Windows and Office that’s available anywhere.

SkyDrive APIs – Bring your data to any app, any platform, any device

Dare Obasanjo — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:15:03 GMT

On Monday, we released preview versions of SkyDrive for Windows and Mac, along with updates for iOS and Windows Phone. With SkyDrive on your desktop, you can now access files in the cloud right from any of your PC or Mac apps. And since we launched our API, we’ve been excited to see mobile, web, and Windows 8 developers add SkyDrive to their apps.

A key principle behind the approach we’ve taken with the SkyDrive developer platform is that while it should be seamlessly accessible from Windows devices and apps, it should also be ready to enable developers on any platform to build apps that make SkyDrive more useful. It’s your data. It should not be limited to apps for a single browser or brand of devices.

Given our recent announcements, we wanted to reiterate how developers can integrate SkyDrive into their apps and devices, showcase a few of our favorite integrations and let people know about a few developer events we are sponsoring in Amsterdam, NYC and Las Vegas.

Android apps

Developers of Android apps can use the Live SDK for Android to build mobile and tablet apps that provide access to a user’s documents and photos in SkyDrive. The SDK supports Android versions 2.2 (Froyo) to 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Browser for SkyDrive (below) is one of our most popular SkyDrive apps on Android. For more information see our getting started docs for Android development.

Desktop apps (Windows or Mac)

With SkyDrive for Windows and Mac, users can transparently cloud-enable their desktop apps without needing to customize the apps since the SkyDrive folder looks like a regular folder on the file system. This opens up literally millions of new possibilities for users.

In some cases, a desktop app may want to integrate directly with SkyDrive, without relying on the user having SkyDrive installed. For example, the SkyDrive gadget for Xobni brings powerful cloud-based sharing to Outlook, making it easy to share large files with email recipients without worrying about large file size limitations.

For more information see our getting started docs for desktop development.

iOS apps

In addition to the SkyDrive for iPhone and iPad, SkyDrive customers can also use any iPhone or iPad apps that use our SDK for iOS to integrate with SkyDrive. The SDK supports development using Xcode 4.1 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Xcode 4.2 on Mac OS X Lion.

A great example of an iOS app that integrates well with SkyDrive is DocScan. When there is no scanner available, DocScan lets you instantly scan multi-page documents with your iPhone, then annotate, and store them in the cloud for later use .

For more information see our getting started docs for iOS development

Mobile Devices

Not only are developers already delivering great SkyDrive apps that people can download to their Android and other phones – but some of the biggest Android OEMs like HTC have also already built SkyDrive right into their phones. HTC’s newest 4.0 devices such as the HTC One X come with SkyDrive, letting you seamlessly work with your SkyDrive photos and documents from their native Mail, Gallery, and Polaris Office experiences.

We have been excited by the enthusiasm for SkyDrive of people making other consumer devices like cameras. Samsung’s new line of WiFi enabled SMART cameras (Amazon) enables users to never lose their valuable memories by uploading pictures to SkyDrive directly from the camera.

Windows Phone apps

On Windows Phone, there have already been dozens of apps that have taken advantage of our SDK for Windows Phone. Apps such as HandyScan (shown below) augment SkyDrive’s seamless integration into the Office and Pictures hub on the phone by bringing personal cloud storage to the apps Windows Phone customers use every day.

For more information see our getting started docs for Windows Phone development

Showcasing your apps

As you can tell, we’re really proud of some of the apps that have integrated with SkyDrive and would like to share them with as many people as possible. That is why, with our release on Monday, we’ve also launched a new app showcase. Now millions of SkyDrive users can discover apps from third party developers that make it easier to share or work from anywhere. The showcase is available from within SkyDrive.com, so users can easily find apps while using the service.

Every month, we’ll add apps to our showcase based on usage and positive feedback from customers. Let us know about apps you like by telling us on Twitter.

Bringing SkyDrive to you and your app

To recap, developers can learn more about the SkyDrive API by visiting dev.live.com. You’ll find links to code samples on GitHub and overview docs, and you can also download our SDKs for Windows 8, WP7, iOS, and Android to simplify development on your favorite device platform. We also have REST APIs and a JavaScript API for web development.

To get the word out about how SkyDrive can help you and your apps, we’ll be attending and sponsoring a few developer events in the coming weeks:

4/25 – 4/27: TNW – Amsterdam
4/27 –4/29: Mobile Dev Camp – NYC
4/30 – 5/4: Future Insights Live – Las Vegas

Let us know if you’ll be there! We’d love to meet you. We’ll be available to help with questions you have on SkyDrive, and we’ll also have cool t-shirts to give away and some other special prizes for people integrating SkyDrive with their apps at these hackathons. Hope to see you there.

Dare Obasanjo
Lead Program Manager, Live Connect Platform

An even faster version of SkyDrive

Tony East — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 18:25:00 GMT

Update, April 24, 2012:

Please note: Even though it works great and shows off our developer APIs, SkyCMD was our April Fool’s joke for 2012. However, check out these real improvements to SkyDrive.

The past year has been an amazing time here on the SkyDrive team. We’re all very eager to ship the work we announced in our next release, but we can’t just sit back and relax. Like a shark, we have to keep moving forward. As we started to think about the next generation interface for SkyDrive, we needed something fresh. It’s too easy to get caught up in the visual distraction of a traditional GUI, especially when you really just want to see a directory listing of your files. As we pulled together the vision, our design principles included getting back to our monochromatic roots, presenting the user with fewer commands, all while providing the most powerful interface possible. So what is the next big thing?

Forget touch and even the mouse

The more we thought about it, the more we realized that the model we were looking for was right in front of us – or at least used to be. We harkened back to a time when computing was simpler. Sure, interface design has changed over the years, but do people really want to navigate through their files with the flick of a finger or view photos with a click of a mouse? Maybe. But we believe the first and best way for humans to interact with computers is through terse commands entered via the good old keyboard. That’s when it hit us: what the world needs is a SkyDrive Command Line Interface!

Introducing SkyCMD

Starting today, you can finally interact with SkyDrive the way you’ve always wanted to. You can use the classic DOS syntax to easily navigate your file hierarchy—familiar commands like “dir” and “cd.” Simple. Powerful.

SkyCMD: Command line access to your files on SkyDrive. Go to http://skycmd.com and check it out.

Once you connect SkyCMD to your SkyDrive account you can do many of the powerful things that only a CLI can offer. As for customization, try the “color” command to give your SkyCMD window a little flare.

Built from our SkyDrive APIs

One of our amazing developers, Luke, came up with the early rendition of SkyCMD and showed it around the SkyDrive hallways a couple months ago. We all loved it and knew that if it had a few more obscure commands and the right ASCII art we had a winner on our hands. The volume of internal feature requests for SkyCMD grew to the point that we’ve put the entire SkyDrive engineering organization to work building it. Our developer APIs, which Dare Obasanjo wrote about in his blog post back in December, are so powerful we just used those. We have even put the source code out as part of our sample code.

Of course in the near future we are going to ship what we recently announced and then some. But going forward the future of SkyDrive is SkyCMD!

Tony East
Lead Program Manager, SkyDrive.com

The war on graymail after 90 days: Over 100 million sweeps, cleanups and newsletters filtered

Dick Craddock — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:25:51 GMT

Hotmail introduced advanced features for fighting the war on graymail this past fall, and since then, customers have conquered graymail over 100 million times using features like Sweep and Schedule Cleanup. In this post, I’ll talk about how Hotmail customers are taking control of their email with Sweep, Schedule Cleanup, and Hotmail’s newsletter filter, and we’ll show you how these tools can help you conquer graymail in your own inbox in just 60 seconds.

The best tools for fighting graymail

Graymail—messages like newsletters, daily deals, and notifications—is filling up inboxes all over the world. Newsletters alone typically make up more than 50% of a person’s email. Managing all that graymail takes time and can be a hassle. Hotmail continues to add innovative features to let you take control of graymail and take back your inbox.

Hotmail’s newsletter category automatically identifies most newsletters and lets you see them all in one place with a single click. One-click unsubscribe lets you get rid of unwanted newsletters instantly.

Schedule Cleanup is a powerful new feature that lets you automatically manage bulk mail. With Schedule Cleanup, you can:

Keep only the latest message from a given sender (by far the most popular choice when using Schedule Cleanup).
Delete messages as they get old (3 days, 10 days, 30 days, or 60 days).
Move messages to a folder as they get old.

Schedule Cleanup not only takes care of the mail you’ve already received, but keeps working for you as you receive new mail. It’s one of the most efficient ways to keep your inbox tidy.

Sweep lets you move or delete unwanted graymail quickly and easily, and can even automatically set up rules for managing new mail as it arrives.

Categories let you organize your mail the way you want. Hotmail automatically categorizes things like newsletters, social updates, photos, Office docs and shipping updates. Now, you can create your own categories and have each one show up as a QuickView.

And of course, these features work well together. Categories can be used together with Schedule Cleanup, making those tools even more powerful. For instance, you can use Schedule Cleanup to delete all newsletters as they get old, just by using Schedule Cleanup on the newsletter category.

100 million actions and counting

It’s been just two months since we finished the deployment of our most recent major release, and we’ve already seen millions of people use these tools to quickly take control of their own inbox. Let’s take a look at some of the numbers.

Since November, 2011, customers have performed over 100 million actions to conquer graymail: Sweeping, categorizing, and using Schedule Cleanup.

You’re using Sweep to get unwanted email out of your inbox: 90% of Sweep actions are “Delete all from this sender.”
You’re letting Sweep set up rules automatically: When you use Sweep to move mail from a given sender into a folder, you let Sweep automatically set up a rule 60% of the time. That means Sweep keeps working for you as you get new email, even when you are away from your inbox.
You’re using Schedule Cleanup to keep only the most recent newsletter or deal: 65% of Schedule Cleanup actions are “Only keep the latest message from this sender.”

And what’s more, we’re seeing an increasing use of these powerful tools. Each month, more people use Sweep and Schedule Cleanup to get rid of their graymail. In fact, we’ve seen a double-digit increase in the use of these features month-over-month since our October release.

Take back your inbox in 60 seconds

The best news is that these tools are quick and easy to use. In this video, we’ll show you how you can take back your own inbox in just 60 seconds.

More and more people are using Hotmail’s innovative tools to fight their own war on graymail, and we hope you’ll give these tools a try yourself. We’d love to hear about your own experience using Sweep, Schedule Cleanup, categories, and the rest.

As always, thanks for using Hotmail.

Dick Craddock

Group Program Manager, Hotmail

SkyDrive and Windows 8

Omar Shahine — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:02:00 GMT

Mike Torres and I just shared a post and video on the Building Windows 8 blog that details a key step we are taking with Windows 8 towards our vision of personal cloud storage. The post describes how we plan to scale our services to billions of people, and some of the coming improvements, including a new Metro style app for Windows 8, SkyDrive integration in Windows Explorer, and the ability to fetch any file remotely from SkyDrive.com.

We encourage you to read the full post and share comments on Building Windows 8.

- Omar

We aren’t surprised that Hotmail’s spam protection is the best in the business

Dick Craddock — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:30:42 GMT

Hotmail has come a long way in spam protection and is now among the best in the industry in keeping spam out of your inbox. Our own internal metrics, customer feedback, and even a recent third-party report confirms that no mail service offers better protection than Hotmail. You can read all about it in the Gadgetwise column in the New York Times.

Our years of improvements in Hotmail’s SmartScreen technology have led to record low rates of spam in the inbox (SITI), and our customers can tell the difference. We’ve driven SITI down below 3% for a typical Hotmail inbox, and, more importantly, we’ve kept the number there.

Beyond the metrics

Our metrics tell us that we’re doing a good job, and we’re pleased with the progress. But let’s look beyond metrics for a moment. Keeping your inbox clean is about three things, and Hotmail does a great job on all three:

Driving true SITI down as low as possible
We’ve recently lowered true SITI an additional 25% since our last update. We’re getting great results, and we just keep improving.
Reducing clutter and graymail
We automatically identify newsletters and give our customers powerful tools for getting through their Inbox faster, including one-click filters to see only the mail you want.
Reduce obvious spam in the Junk folder
Sure, it’s great to keep spam out of the inbox, but you still need to visit your Junk folder every now and then to make sure you haven’t missed something important. Hotmail not only keeps more spam out of your inbox, it keeps obvious spam out of your Junk folder to make this job easier. In fact, our recent efforts have reduced the size of our customers’ Junk folders by more than 50% - that’s about a half a billion fewer pure spam messages per day.

Our customers can tell the difference

Metrics are great, but what we really care about is hearing from our customers about their own experiences with Hotmail. We have several ways to get customer feedback:

Customer support: Complaints related to spam, including phishing, junk and malware, have dropped by over 40% over the past year.

Direct customer feedback: Hotmail includes a feedback link, which we call “voice of the customer” or VOTC. Our voice of the customer data gives us incredibly valuable feedback and verbatim comments from you on what’s going well and what isn’t. We take this feedback seriously: members of the development team read this feedback every day and spend time categorizing it, finding patterns and trends, and using it to make product improvments. The total number of complaints related to spam has shrunk by over 50% over the past two years. This would be a great result by itself, but it’s even more remarkable when you consider that our overall feedback volume has been steadily increasing.

We’ve seen really spectacular progress in certain areas around spam management. For example, complaints about managing safe and blocked sender lists has dropped to near zero. Questions like “why did my mail end up where it did?” have similarly dropped to near zero. Complaints around “repeat spam” have been cut in half – from 35% down to 17% of complaint volume.

While we’re happy with the results, we know that there are still areas to improve. For example, we still see feedback on phishing attacks.

In-product telemetry: We know that customers who use Hotmail regularly (for example, as their primary email) see lower than average SITI due to our investments in personalization of our spam filtering. Put simply: the more you use Hotmail, the better the experience gets.

An independent study confirms it: no one beats Hotmail

As much as we invest in our own telemetry and instrumentation to understand the spam problem, sometimes it’s nice to get an outside perspective. Cascade Insights gave us just that recently with a comprehensive study of the major email services to see how each performed in the face of incoming spam. We were excited to see an analyst go deep on SPAM and compare the different webmail providers, so we’ve paid Cascade for rights to access and distribute their private report and methodology.

The short story? No one did better than Hotmail. In fact, Hotmail and Gmail were dead even when dealing with spam, and both did much better than other email providers.

The methodology defined by Cascade Insights was straightforward and consistent across email providers. It’s important to note that this was just one study which used a particular methodology, and that your own results may vary. But we’re confident that if you use Hotmail for your primary email, you’ll get the best spam protection in the industry – no one does it better.

Give us a try

If you’re already using Hotmail, we want to hear from you. You can use the Feedback link in Hotmail to let us know about your own spam experience.

If you haven’t tried us out in a while, take a look. If you have a Hotmail account that you haven’t been using, you may see some accumulation of mail you don’t want. Some of it might be old spam, and some might be graymail. (That’s legitimate email that you just don’t want, like newsletters or daily deals you’re no longer interested in. We’ll have more on that subject soon.) We recommend using Sweep to clean up your Inbox, then using Hotmail as your primary email for a while to get the benefit of our improvements, especially what we’ve done with personalization. Once you start using your account again, you should see very little spam on an ongoing basis.

We’re working hard to keep spam out of your inbox, and we hope you like the results. As always, thanks for using Hotmail.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail

Solving the attachment problem with SkyDrive

Anand Babu — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:57:26 GMT

We’ve talked about our approach to connecting the file cloud, app cloud and device cloud. A key part of the work we are doing in the app cloud is to bring the benefits of cloud-based file sharing to email apps.

In this post, Lia Yu, a product marketer on the SkyDrive team, describes the problems people have with traditional email attachments and how the cloud can solve them. We’ve also included a few tips for how SkyDrive can help at work – where we’re often inundated with attachments. (SkyDrive may be particularly helpful if your workplace hasn’t made the switch yet from outdated to modern tools.)

We hope you find these tips helpful – and look out for more updates soon.

- Anand Babu, Group Product Marketer, SkyDrive

The attachment problem

Every day, the average office worker receives over 170 email messages a day, and sends over 35. With that kind of volume, it’s understandable that over half of the average work day consists of dealing with email. That’s over 1000 hours a year. It’s worth taking a look at where people can save some time on the process.

Dealing with email attachments is a big contributor to the amount of time spent on email. In Hotmail alone, there are over 1 billion email messages sent with file attachments per week. While attachments can be useful, in many situations, they aren’t the right tool for the job.

To see how much time an attachment can waste during its life, click here to see our infographic.

Here are some examples of when attachments are frequently a waste of time:

1. Working together on a document

If you use email to work with others on a doc, everyone has their own edited version saved locally on a computer that they then have to send as an email attachment to the group. With so many doc versions being sent back and forth, docs can get lost and a lot of extra work is created. If people edit simultaneously, someone will have to go through multiple versions and try to merge edits into one doc. It’s colossally inefficient and potentially migraine inducing.

2. Sharing and publishing files

If you need to share files with a large audience, using email often means sending files over and over again—either because you need to update the files after you send them, or because the people you sent the files to lost your attachment in the chaos of their inbox.

3. Sending large files

Most of us have had the problem where we tried to send files that got bounced back because their file size was too big, or because your recipient’s inbox couldn’t handle a massive file you just sent. Even if you zip or break apart your attachments, that takes a lot of extra time-wasting steps to send those files.

4. Making notes and files available anywhere, anytime, across devices

Accessing your important files anywhere should not require you to send an email to yourself. Even though we all do it, that method is pretty primitive. You usually end up having to search for the email buried somewhere in your inbox or sending it again later.

The attachment solution

Today’s cloud services offer a great alternative to attachments that solve many of these problems. Instead of emailing docs back and forth for group editing, SkyDrive lets you edit the doc in one place using Office Web Apps or Office on your PC and Mac—saving all your versions in one place. Sharing files, large or small, is also easier on SkyDrive because you can send out a link to the doc to avoid attachment size limits. Also, you can use the link to edit the doc even after you send it to others.

Yet despite the efficiency of the cloud, the vast majority of people still cling to email attachments. What’s holding people back? While some services solve the attachment problem better than others the real enemy is inertia. We spend so much of our time in email that attachments seem like the most convenient option.

There are two key things we are doing to address this inertia:

1. Connecting SkyDrive to webmail

Our primary approach has been to bring SkyDrive into the natural place where people send files, which as we’ve mentioned is email. Hotmail allows you to easily send documents and photos via SkyDrive. The integration of Office Web Apps means you won’t lose your formatting when you send your files as online documents. And you can even configure Hotmail to always send files using SkyDrive by default.

Of course, for people using services like Gmail, you can access your email right from Hotmail as well as import your contacts. This way, you can send those links to SkyDrive files using the Hotmail features, while still keeping your Gmail identity.

Already, files uploaded to SkyDrive represent over 15% of the total number of email attachments sent via Hotmail every month. This share is growing rapidly – with monthly uploads to SkyDrive up over 90% in the last year alone.

2. Making it easy for other apps and services to work with SkyDrive

We know that people share files using many different devices, apps and email clients. That’s a key reason why we’ve focused on making it easy for developers to add SkyDrive to their experiences.

An example is Xobni who recently released a SkyDrive Gadget. If you use Xobni for Outlook, it’s easy to email a link to a file on SkyDrive without leaving Outlook. Use the gadget to find the SkyDrive file that you want to share. With a single click, you can copy the link to your clipboard or compose a new message including the link.

Tips for avoiding attachment problems

To help overcome inertia, we have launched a new site www.attachmentssuck.com to help you teach your friends how to make the switch from attachments to SkyDrive. Encourage your friends and co-workers to start saving themselves (and you) hours of time.

In addition, here are a few power tips that are particularly relevant if you share presentations frequently. (You can get other tips for avoiding attachments, here.)

Tip 1: Upload and organize presentations on SkyDrive

Upload your presentations (or any other file) to SkyDrive. You may also want to use folders or subfolders to keep all of your presentations related to a particular topic or customer in one place. That way, it’s easy for you to reference and easy for recipients to find content—with a single a link to your folder.

Upload your presentation to SkyDrive

Organize your presentations by subject

Choose to share an entire folder, or just one file

Tip 2: Share frequently used presentations right from Outlook

If you install the SkyDrive Gadget for Xobni, you can send a link to SkyDrive files right from Outlook. Just click the SkyDrive gadget tab in the Xobni app, find the file you want to share, and click “Email a Link” to pop up an email window with the link.

Unlike other cloud services, SkyDrive integrates with Office Web Apps so your recipients don’t need to have the same version of Office that you do (or any Office software) to be able to view what you send them. Also, thanks to our recent sharing improvements, you can easily share files in any of your SkyDrive folders without having to copy or move them to a special folder.

Note: The Xobni gadget gives your recipients access to view files only. If you want to let them edit your doc or add files to a folder, visit SkyDrive.com to get a link to view and edit.

Tip 3: Send once, update often

If you’ll need to make edits to the presentation later, open it from SkyDrive in PowerPoint 2010 and pin the presentation to your Windows 7 taskbar for easy access. Then you can easily update it on your PC and anyone with your link will automatically have access to the updated version.

Tip 4: Share your presentation like an expert

If you’re giving your presentation remotely or on a screen, you can include a unique bit.ly link on the last slide that directs viewers to your presentation on your SkyDrive. Just go to bit.ly, enter the SkyDrive address of your presentation, hit “customize” and enter a unique and descriptive title after the forward slash. Like: bit.ly/skydriveecards.

If you’re giving handouts of your presentation, you can create a QR code to include on the printed version, linking to your presentation on SkyDrive, so meeting attendees can scan the tag/code and access the presentation. To add a QR code to your bit.ly link, just append .qr to the end of the URL like so: bit.ly/skydriveecards.qr. Click the link, and you’ve got your QR code.

Tip 5: Present from anywhere

When you’re on the road, you can view and edit the presentation from anywhere—even if you’re on a device without Office, using the Office Web Apps on SkyDrive.

Where do we go from here?

SkyDrive will continue to fight the good fight against the attachment problem. We will do this by making SkyDrive an even better alternative to attachments and by working with partners to bring SkyDrive to the places that people share today. If you’re a developer inspired by our mission to solve the attachment problem, our APIs are available here.

Lia Yu, Sr. Product Marketer, SkyDrive

Connect your Android device to SkyDrive with OneNote and other apps

Anand Babu — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:03:00 GMT

As we design SkyDrive to reach billions of people, we know it’s important that your files are automatically available across Windows devices, while being accessible on a broad range of devices.

With Windows Phone, your SkyDrive files are automatically available from the Office and Pictures hubs. SkyDrive will also work seamlessly with Windows 8. In addition, you can access files from other devices using SkyDrive.com, SkyDrive for iPhone and via 3^rd party apps or devices using SkyDrive APIs.

In addition to storing files on SkyDrive, many people use OneNote together with SkyDrive to organize and access notes, web pages, audio clips and more. More people are using SkyDrive in this way as OneNote has become available on new platforms and devices, including the OneNote Web App, OneNote for Windows Phone and OneNote for iPhone & iPad.

Today, we’re excited that the Office team is making OneNote for Android available in 57 markets worldwide with easy access to your notes on SkyDrive. The app also offers key OneNote features like checklists, image capture, table editing and support for hyperlinks. Please note that not all Android devices are created equal. You currently need to have a device running Android 2.3 or higher and with access to Android Market to use OneNote for Android.

If you have an Android device, we also encourage you to try other apps from partners built using SkyDrive APIs. For example with Browser for SkyDrive or Cloud Explorer for SkyDrive, you can view, access and upload documents or photos on your Android phone. Portfolio for SkyDrive lets you organize and upload photos from your Android phone in batches to SkyDrive. If you want to add SkyDrive support to your app, site or device, please visit our developer center.

Portfolio for SkyDrive

Browser for SkyDrive

We hope you find these apps useful for accessing OneNote and SkyDrive on the go. For full details on OneNote for Android, please visit the OneNote Blog.

Anand Babu

Product Manager

Turn over a new leaf and switch from Gmail to Hotmail in 3 easy steps

Dharmesh Mehta — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:00:51 GMT

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

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.
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).
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

Hotmail, already powering over 15 million phones and growing, comes to Kindle Fire

David Law — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:57:02 GMT

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

SkyDrive and Office: 7 tips for full-powered collaboration in the cloud across PCs and Macs

Anand Babu — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:00:00 GMT

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:

Use Safari or Firefox to sign in to SkyDrive.com. (Select “Keep me signed in”)
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:

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.
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

Now SmartScreen automatically identifies more than one billion newsletters every day

Dick Craddock — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:59:00 GMT

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.

Designing app-centric sharing for SkyDrive, part 2 of 2: Rebuilding permissions

Omar Shahine — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:01:00 GMT

One of the biggest changes we made to the recent SkyDrive release was how we deal with permissions on files and folders. Making these underlying changes to our service without impacting customers is a bit like replacing the engines on an airplane while it’s flying. The technical challenges were tremendous, but the end result is a system that allows far more flexibility in how you share your files and photos. This post was authored by David Nichols, Software Development Lead for our Storage system, and discusses the technical challenges in making app-centric sharing possible.

-Omar Shahine, Group Program Manager, SkyDrive.com

Our latest releases of SkyDrive include a major revision to our sharing system that lets you give other people permission to see—or even edit—your documents and photos. These releases involved a lot of work in both our front-end web system, which implements the user interface to SkyDrive.com, and our back-end file system, designed to provide persistent storage for your documents and photos. You can also see this capability in SkyDrive for Windows Phone and iPhone in the form of “view-only” and “view and edit” link sharing. Along the way we had several design challenges, and in this post we’ll look at three of them: Sharing your data with people who don’t use Windows Live, sharing your data from anywhere in your file tree, and finding the files that people have shared with you.

Share your data with anyone

Social networks were still new when we first designed SkyDrive. Facebook wasn’t available outside of universities; MySpace was in its heyday; the idea of integration between networks was a long way off. We expected the sharing patterns to be either sharing with a specific list of contacts in Windows Live or with Messenger buddies. In particular, it was awkward to share with someone who doesn’t have a Windows Live account. The solution to this problem lies in the way we represent sharing permission for files and folders.

Every file or folder in SkyDrive has an optional “access control list” that shows who’s allowed to read or edit the file or folder. You can apply permissions at the folder level (which means that everything inside the folder has the same set of permissions), or you can apply different permissions to individual items inside the folder. This is similar to how enterprise systems (such as Microsoft Windows) track permission information, but our system has a twist.

In addition to being able to hold entries such as “user x” or “buddies of user y,” our system can also hold “token-based” access items. A token is just a string of random (and thus unguessable) bits. If you know the bits, you can gain whatever access the token gives you. We embed these tokens in URLs and send them out in the invitation email when you share a file. When the recipient clicks the link in the invitation, they either get direct access to the file, or get the option to add their Windows Live ID to the access list for the file.

Here’s an example of how this works

Let’s say that Alice wants to share her famous fried okra recipe with Bob, Carol, and David. She knows their email addresses but only has a Windows Live ID for Carol, who is one of her Messenger buddies. Alice uses the Share dialog on the file “Fried Okra.docx” and enters the email addresses for Bob, Carol, and David. After sending the invitation, the access list for “Fried Okra.docx” looks something like this:

Who	Access	Comment
Token 23 (the real ones are longer)	Read	‘bob@contoso.com’
carol@hotmail-example.com (a Windows Live ID)	Read
Token 51	Read	david@contoso.com

Bob gets an email with the token URL, and simply uses it to read the document. As long as he saves the email, he can continue to use that URL (unless Alice changes her mind, see below). Carol uses the URL and logs in with her Windows Live ID. By doing so, not only can she see the document, but it shows up on her “Shared With Me” list whenever she uses SkyDrive. David has a Windows Live ID that Alice didn’t know about, so when he uses the URL, he’s able to substitute his actual Windows Live ID for the token and also see the okra recipe in his “Shared With Me” list. At this point, the access looks like this:

Who	Access	Comment
Token 23 (the real ones are longer)	Read	‘bob@contoso.com’
carol@hotmail-example.com (a Windows Live ID)	Read
david@live-example.com	Read	david@contoso.com

Why the comments? Their purpose is to help with revocation. Say Alice has a change of heart about sharing and wants to remove access from Bob and Carol. When she goes to edit access for the document, she needs to see something more informative than “Token 23.” Because the system remembered the original recipients the tokens were intended for, Alice can chose the correct items to remove from the access list. Once the token has been revoked, the URL in Bob’s saved email will stop working.

Share your files without moving them

The old sharing system for SkyDrive was optimized for the way we expected people to use the system at the time. SkyDrive was used mostly for sharing photos, so we wanted to make it as simple as possible to share an album at a time. We understood that tracking what was shared and what wasn’t could get complex, so we limited the possible “sharable things” to top-level albums in someone’s SkyDrive.

As we added support for storing, editing and finding Office documents, we realized that this simple sharing model wouldn’t capture the sharing patterns our users needed. As Tony East mentioned in his post Designing app-centric sharing for SkyDrive, part 1 of 2: Complexity of “simple,” the ability to share shouldn’t depend on file organization. You should be able to point to any file, anywhere, and share it without moving it.

The problem with this lay in an early decision to store file access information in a different service than the SkyDrive backend. Until this release, the access lists for folders were stored in our contacts and relationships system, ABCH. While this made sense in light of the scenarios at the time, the new sharing model was going to cause scaling issues, because every shared file in SkyDrive would require data in ABCH.

To get the access lists back in SkyDrive, we needed a data migration. Data migrations are quite complicated in large scale on-line systems, because the user data is partitioned across many servers in our data centers. Both SkyDrive and ABCH partition the users across servers, but we use different patterns to do so. So while Alice and Bob’s data might be on the same server in SkyDrive, their data is likely on different servers in ABCH.

We know how to do this: start up a set of migration tasks in our job system, have them examine each user individually, and then move that user’s data. Because we’re moving data from one system to another, this can take as long as few months to complete. To speed up the effective migration speed, we used a local-to-SkyDrive pass that tweaked our internal data format to support on-demand migration. As soon as this was done, we were ready to support the new features. If a user edits sharing on an existing folder, we bring the data for that folder over right away. In the meantime, our migration job is moving all the data, whether it’s changed or not.

Find what’s shared with you

Another feature of our sharing system that’s different from conventional file systems is the “Shared With Me” list. While you can save all the invitation emails you get that are letting you know about files your friends have shared, we’ve found that it’s great if the system can manage this list for you. Because we partition our file data on servers by the user who owns the data, this isn’t trivial to do. If ten people share files with Alice, the access lists for those files are on ten different servers out of hundreds in our system, so there’s no one good place to go to for the list. To solve this problem, our implementation builds on our full-text indexing system, so let’s take a look at that.

Full-text systems work by taking documents in the system and finding all the words in each. From this, they create “inverted indices,” which have words and the corresponding list of documents that contain those words. For example, there might be an entry like “okra: 1,7,107,243,512,514,…” and another, “recipe: 3,56,107,201,512,703,…” which means that the word “okra” appears in the first, seventh, 107st, 243^rd, etc. documents, and that “recipe” appears in the third, 56^th, 107^th, 201^st, etc. documents. To find all documents with “okra” and “recipe”, we take the intersection of the two lists (which is easy, since they’re in order), and discover that the 107^th and 512^th documents contain both words.

For SkyDrive, we have a full-text index of all documents in the system. However, we can’t let people see all the documents in a search result, only the ones they are allowed to view. To do this, we index the Windows Live IDs of the allowed viewers onto the documents as well. In addition to the word entries above, we add special strings to the documents that get indexed much like the words do, but which encode the permission data. For example, the string “VIEWER=carol@hotmail-example.com” would mean that Carol has view permission for a specific document. Then the inverted index gets an entry like “VIEWER=carol@hotmail-example.com: 39, 107, 762, ...” When Carol searches for “okra recipe,” we change the query to “okra recipe VIEWER=carol@hotmail-example.com.” So Carol gets document 107 back, but not document 512, which she isn’t allowed to read.

With this index, an obvious way to implement “Shared With Me” is to search for the documents Carol is allowed to read. This isn’t exactly right, but it’s close. First, we want to exclude documents that she owns, because we’re showing them elsewhere. Second, we need to include photos, which normally aren’t in the full- text index. Finally, we don’t really want all the files Carol has access to, but only the files or folders where someone explicitly added Carol. If Alice shares a folder with 100 documents, we want only the folder to show up in Shared With Me, not all 100 of the contained documents. If she shares a single spreadsheet, we want to show it too.

The answer to these problems is to index all the shared files or folders with a second index field which tracks exactly the documents and folders that got explicitly shared. This field is only on the shared items, not on files contained within folders, and doesn’t include the document owner. Our search is then for “SHARED-WITH=carol@hotmail-example.com,” which gives us exactly what we want.

Moving forward

Our changes in the system are a big step forward in our ability to support our sharing scenarios, but we know we aren’t done yet. As we collect feedback from you, we’ll continue to evolve how the sharing system works. With this work, we think we’re in a good spot to move forward rapidly.

David Nichols

Software Development Lead, SkyDrive.com