On December 31, 2010, a number of our users reported their email messages and folders were missing from their Hotmail accounts.  I want to take a little time to explain what happened, and what steps we’ve taken to fix this problem and prevent it from happening in the future. In Hotmail, one way...

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...

When you want to get in touch with someone, where do you look? There are lots of places that people store their contact data - the address book for their email account, their Instant Message buddy list, Facebook, LinkedIn, their phone…. When you find that person you want to reach out to, is their information...

Hotmail Calendar has more than 18 million customers creating more than 1 million events per month. We're happy to announce that we've just released an update to Hotmail Calendar that addresses the most common request we get: improving the way reminders work. Now you can: Set up multiple reminders for...

Hotmail's fight against spam has certainly come a long way in the last five years. Over the last several years we've made substantial investments in the research and development of sophisticated anti-spam technologies. SmartScreen is the collective name we use for a cloud-based set of technologies and...

A look at trends in photos and videos A lot has changed in the three years since we launched the first Windows Live Photo Gallery . For starters, there are a lot more people taking photos. About 10 billion more photos will be taken in the US in 2010 than in 2007—rising from about 47 billion...

As announced today in New York , Windows Phone 7 is coming soon! We’ve been working hard over the last several months to make sure Windows Live can connect you to your stuff and the people you care about across your Windows PC, your phone, and the web. Earlier this year, we released the new Hotmail and...

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...

Beginning on December 30th we had an issue with Windows Live Hotmail that impacted 17,355 accounts. Customers impacted temporarily lost the contents of their mailbox through the course of mailbox load balancing between servers.  We identified the root cause and restored mail to the impacted accounts...

It’s been a pretty wild last 8 months since we launched the Office Web Apps Technical Preview on SkyDrive. We’ve had so much demand for the technical preview that we had to expand its availability , and we’ve seen a lot of excitement about the integration of our web apps with the Office 2010 Beta . And...

We’ve kept ourselves busy this summer. A few months ago, we released a re-invented Windows Live Hotmail designed around what people said they wanted—a more efficient service to help them manage clutter with features like Sweep and one-click filters , save time with ActiveViews , share hundreds of large...

The Hotmail rollout continues to go along smoothly and we’re right on track with our release plan, having now upgraded nearly 50 million accounts on several different clusters. Of course, we continue to get comments from many of you who are eager to get access to the new Hotmail, and we’re just as eager...

What we set out to accomplish Talking to customers gives us great ideas about how to make Hotmail better . One of the things we hear about the most is inbox overload: folks want to find important emails quickly. Whether it’s an important back-and-forth conversation with friends or a YouTube video that...

Hello, I'm Alessio Roic from Microsoft Outlook, guest-blogging here today to make an important announcement. After several months of beta testing, Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 has officially been released! Why use Outlook Hotmail Connector? If you have been using Outlook Connector 12.1, you...

Starting today, you can create and manage multiple email aliases from a single Hotmail account. Together with features that we introduced in November that let you use Hotmail with any existing email address , the new aliasing feature makes it easy to use a different email address and still get all the...

Hi, my name is John Scarrow and, in conjunction with other product groups, I oversee service abuse and security issues for Windows Live and other Microsoft products such as Internet Explorer. Building from Dick Craddock’s previous post , I’m going to get into the nuts and bolts of how we fight phishing...

As Piero mentioned in his blog post, we had two main goals when building the newest version of Windows Live: making everyday tasks simpler, and connecting Windows 7 to the cloud. In the new Windows Live Mail beta , we did a lot of work to make these goals a reality, and today I’d like to give you a quick...

Ever wonder how Hotmail stores the billions of email messages we receive each day? Keeping our customers’ data safe and readily available is an immense responsibility that we take very seriously. And to do so efficiently at our scale is a sizeable engineering challenge. This post will discuss how we...

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...

Over the past few weeks, we've announced many new features coming in Windows Live Messenger. By now you've probably played with the Beta, and if you haven't, you can get it now at http://explore.live.com . You can also see how Messenger goes with you wherever you are -- on the new Hotmail or even using...

Not too long ago, account hijacking was an issue limited mostly to financial service websites. Now the practice has grown to threaten other web services like email, disrupting millions of accounts every year. When an email account is compromised by hijackers, it violates the privacy of the account owner...

We announced last week a new version of SkyDrive , in which SkyDrive was redesigned from the ground up to have great performance on modern browsers. Like the SkyDrive team, we’ve also been hard at work on ways to speed up Hotmail . We measured how fast our Hotmail pages loaded all over the world and...

One of the wonderful and difficult things about building software for hundreds of millions of customers is that any change you make is an opportunity to either delight or annoy your customers. Sometimes you do both. Over the past several years, we’ve received a lot of negative feedback on the old user...

Beginning today, Hotmail is providing you with the option to enhance the security of your entire Hotmail session with HTTPS data encryption (via secure socket layers, or SSL), which is currently used to help secure your Hotmail sign-in. Today’s update joins a series of other recent security updates ...

Every e-mail system has spam, and Hotmail is no exception. However, our SmartScreen™ spam-fighting system is one of the most effective in the industry. This post will give you the inside scoop on how we use it to fight the menace that is spam, and what you can do to help. Spam is war Why do people send...