Windows Live Hotmail Changes Coming

More update information is coming from Microsoft and this time it is in the form of an email from Dick Craddock who is the Microsoft Program Manager for the Hotmail Partner Group.

This email highlights some of the major changes coming to your Hotmail inbox:

Here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming.

Keep your inbox free of spam
Using the same Microsoft SmartScreen® technology used in other Microsoft products like Microsoft Office Outlook® and Internet Explorer®, Hotmail is automatically helping to filter out junk mail for you.

Sweep away unwanted email
As you complete email actions like deleting email or moving email into folders, the new Sweep tool will prompt you to see if you wish to automatically apply that action to all similar email in the future.

Send hundreds of photos without worrying about size limits
We’ve built a way to send up to 10 GB of content via a single message—up to 200 photos or 200 files of up to 50 MB in size each. When you hit send, we deliver a nicely formatted email with a link to where the photos are stored on your password-protected Windows Live™ SkyDrive™. Recipients can then easily view your photos as a slide show or download them to their computer.

Smart filters organize your inbox to find the email that matters
Hotmail Quick Views will sort and group email by content or sender into one list in your inbox. Now items like your Facebook updates, or your cable TV bills, or just the mail containing photos can be easily sorted with just a few clicks.

View entire email conversations at a glance
With the new Conversation View, you can automatically group all the email you have sent and received on a specific topic together in one view.

Respond to social network notifications without leaving Hotmail
When a friend or family member sends you a link to a YouTube video or a Flickr photo album, you can view it without leaving your inbox. You’ll also be able to take actions on shipping notifications as well as social network invites.

Open, view, and edit documents right in your inbox
Now the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in your inbox can be viewed and edited without leaving Hotmail. If you need to make edits to an attachment, Hotmail lets you do it from your inbox without worrying about downloading files or installing software. You can even start a PowerPoint slide show and it will include all the animations and transitions.

Share Microsoft Office documents online and work together with others
Just like how you can share large photo albums, Hotmail lets you send large documents and other files via a link—up to 200 files, each up to 50 MB—using online storage, so you avoid clogging anyone’s inbox. And by sending from your Hotmail account, recipients can also use the free Microsoft Office Web Apps to view and edit your document—no matter what email service they use or version of Microsoft Office they have installed.

That’s just a peek at what we’ve been working on for you. Look for these updates and many more over the coming weeks as we start delivering them to your Hotmail account.

The Hotmail Team at Microsoft

I have seen these new features in a demo session and they are impressive. I just wish I knew what exactly the time frame coming weeks meant to have a better idea of when these changes will be published to everyone.

Let us know when you see these updates in your Hotmail inbox.