Hotmail celebrates 15 years’ birthday

Dick Craddock, Hotmail group programme manager of Microsoft, said the group intended to provide two new calendar features that provide more instant access to the things that matter to users. The group is adding a mini-calendar that’s similar to Outlook’s in the left pane of Hotmail.

“We’re rolling out the mini-calendar on a trial basis now in order to get feedback and expect to turn it on for all users soon,” said Craddock.

The group has stated this year with seven releases in the last six months and each containing many new features for customers and often a lot more under the hood. Of which, the new features enable users to add new email addresses without the hassle of multiple account as over three million aliases have already been created.

The Facebook chat was rolled out worldwide so that Hotmail customer could chat with their Messenger and Facebook friends right from the Inbox. Over five million people are already chatting with their Facebook friends from Hotmail.

The other features include proofs help protect Hotmail account from theft, taskbar pinning, desktop notifications, and jump list support with IE9 and emails from LinkedIn, Posterous and Livingsocial can be Active Views.

"The new Hotmail no longer waits for server responses for most operations. In the new Hotmail, when you delete a message, Hotmail updates the message list instantly, and you can resume working right away. In the background, client code queues up actions and calls the server to delete the email. So email still gets deleted, but without the wait,"

This made Hotmail feel slow, because you felt you had to wait for the operation to complete before you could continue working," Tran Van Hue, information technology Nhat Nghe director.

A year ago, Hotmail was improved significantly such as active views, quick views, filters, photo mails SmartScreen technology and conversation threading along with Sweep function to change the way of cleaning up.

“To date, our customers have used the feature millions of times and swept hundreds of millions of messages out of their inboxes,” said Craddock.