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...

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 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...

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...

Hi, my name is Jeff Kunins, and I am the Group Program Manager (GPM) for social networking across Windows Live . In other words, I’m totally focused on partnering with and connecting to social networks and other web services that you already love, allowing them to light up Hotmail , Messenger , SkyDrive...

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...

When I talk about what we’re doing in Windows Live, people often start by asking me: What is Windows Live ? Many folks know about Hotmail and Messenger , and there are millions of users of our other desktop apps and services like SkyDrive , Photo Gallery , and Movie Maker . So what people are really...

Starting today, Hotmail and select partners are introducing a new type of interactive and dynamic email that runs on the Hotmail Active Views platform. Beginning in the late 90s, email services evolved from supporting just plain text and attachments to supporting rich, HTML-based email. This was a big...

In recent posts we’ve talked about the new Messenger and the re-invention of Hotmail . Today, we’re going to spend time on the new Windows Live Essentials . You can also view this video on YouTube Windows Live Essentials – the essential software for...

As we think about features to add to Hotmail, one of the things we look at is how customers are using other mail apps like Outlook, and if some of the things they love about those apps would also be valuable in Hotmail. Today, we’re excited to tell you about some of the latest Outlook features that we...

This week, we will release an update to Windows Live Essentials 2011 . In addition to changes that improve performance and quality of service, the update also includes full support for SSL in Windows Live Mail , and the latest Bing bar. Here are a few of things we think you’ll find the most interesting...

It's here! Hot on the heels of the Hotmail roll-out , the new Windows Live Essentials is now available for public beta testing. Windows Live Essentials beta requires Windows Vista or Windows 7, and is available in English, French, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, or Spanish.  Get...

We are pleased to announce that Windows Live Essentials 2011 for Windows 7 and Windows Vista is now available for download! (Releasing in 48 languages over the next few hours, so if your language is not yet available, it will be very soon.) Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed and built to connect...

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...

Hotmail is the world’s leading email service, and last year we added support for Exchange Active Sync , allowing customers around the world to sync their Hotmail inbox, calendar, and contacts to their mobile phones through the power of Exchange.  Although we’ve had this support for a year already...

Today we released an optional update for Wave 3 of the Windows Live Essentials suite in all 48 languages. This is a minor release that updates Windows Live Messenger, Mail, Family Safety, Writer, and Sync. You can install it from http://download.live.com , or through Microsoft Update as an optional update...

Everyone has their own favorite way of keeping important email close at hand – marking unread, flagging, or filing in a folder. But each system has drawbacks. The new release of Hotmail solves this problem once and for all by making a simple and elegant change to the way flags work. Now, when you...

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...

Today we’re releasing an update to Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta . One of the main reasons we release betas is to allow early adopters to enjoy our products and provide feedback on their experience. First, we want to say thank you for your help. For Messenger alone, we had over 3 million unique...

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...

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...

These are exciting times to be working on an email product. This is perhaps surprising, given that email has been with us since the very first days of the Internet. It is one of the most ubiquitous and well understood communication technologies, right up there with the telephone and the (snail mail)...