If you read Jeff Kunins' post a few weeks ago about the growth of Windows Live Messenger in the last decade, you already know that Messenger's growth has been pretty phenomenal. With such growth comes passionate feedback from customers, and a unique set of challenges around supporting those customers...

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...

I wanted to talk about a new user safety feature we just introduced in Wave 4: SmartScreen for URLs This safety feature is another step Windows Live is taking to protect you from socially engineered attacks and account abuse. This abuse is an industry-wide problem, and we've seen a significant uptick...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We’ve spent the last few months posting about how we look at the industry, the key customer problems that are top-of-mind for us, and where we think we can improve the lives of our customers. Today in a speech at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, Steve Ballmer is sharing a preview of the new Windows...

Personal upfront investment vs. usage in Hotmail We spend a lot of time studying how people manage their email. We know that people use a variety of tools to find messages, file messages , and navigate through all their mail. But some tools are used more commonly than others. Of course, every tool has...

In the first part of this series on the design process for the new Hotmail, I mentioned the very important role that user feedback plays and highlighted the principles we use to make decisions that lead to meaningful, discoverable improvements for our users. Now that the new Hotmail has been released...

Wanting privacy is not about needing something to hide. It’s about wanting to maintain control. Often, privacy isn't about hiding; it's about creating space to open up. If you remember that privacy is about maintaining a sense of control, you can understand why Privacy is Not Dead. There are good reasons...

Hi, my name is Arthur de Haan and I am responsible for Test and System Engineering in Windows Live. To kick things off, I’d like to give you a look behind the scenes at Hotmail, and tell you more about what it takes to build, deploy and run the Windows Live Hotmail service on such a massive global scale...

As we look at usage patterns for people who use Windows Live Photos , Messenger , and other online services, we've seen the emergence of a broad pattern that has been shaping our thinking as we work on new versions of our products. What we see is an explosion of sharing – and of its natural consequence...

A few months ago I authored a post that sets the context for some of the privacy discussion that’s currently happening, and how we think about privacy in Windows Live. This post describes the new privacy features in Windows Live , including a new way to differentiate between sharing with your close friends...

The first thing that comes to mind when you think of Windows Live Messenger is usually instant messaging – bouncing short text messages back and forth. But there are tons of things we've built into Messenger to make that experience more meaningful, and closer to a real face-to-face interaction. My name...

Engineering is a process, with trial and error, analysis, weighing of pros and cons, planning for the unexpected, and discovering unexpected issues along the way. It’s exciting precisely because we’re always learning as we go. I want to welcome you to our new blog, which is about just that: the engineering...

If you take a look through Dick Craddock’s blog post from earlier this year, A short history of Hotmail , or A peek behind the scenes at Hotmail , by Arthur de Haan , you’ll see that Hotmail has experienced enormous growth since it started 15 years ago. Today it delivers a service that is localized to...

Hi, my name is Dick Craddock and I’m the Group Program Manager for Windows Live Hotmail . “Group Program Manager” is just a fancy way of saying that I manage the team of Program Managers at Hotmail. We have the job of planning each Hotmail release and managing that release from beginning to end. We pick...

This post will give a bit more depth on SmartScreen® and our approach to spam filtering, and on a particularly evil kind of spam called a phishing attack. I'll' also explain why individual e-mail accounts experience different levels of spam, and what you can do to reduce spam in your own account...

With the recent release of our developer platform we’ve made it easy for developers on modern mobile platforms such as Windows Phone, Android, and iOS to easily integrate the ability for users to access their information such as contacts and photos from Hotmail, Messenger, and SkyDrive in their favorite...

On the Windows Live Hotmail team, we spend a lot of time talking to people about email. It’s one of the ways we figure out what people want, what their pain points are, and what we can build that might delight them. Even though we’re the most widely used email service in the world with over...

Hello – Thanks to all for the first round of comments.  As I said in my previous post , this is the start of a two-way conversation intended to discuss how we build and operate our services. We love all the comments and suggestions and we’ll read every one.  I’ve responded privately to more...

Since releasing the latest version of our developer platform , we’ve gotten a number of requests for code samples on popular smartphone platforms such as iOS as well as for Microsoft technologies like C# and ASP.NET. Today we’re pleased to announce that we’ve created a code sample repository on GitHub...

When we looked into how people used email, we found some interesting patterns. It turns out that there are generally three types of people when it comes to email: pilers, filers, and purgers. Which are you? Piler: “I generally don’t put email into a folder or archive. I don’t delete it. I just let it...

Windows Live Messenger is both a powerful and fun communications tool for staying in touch with your friends, family and co-workers.  It is a semi-enclosed environment where you can freely interact with the people you know and trust – the people in your network. Unfortunately, over the last couple...