Hard to believe that its been 15 years since the introduction of Hotmail. Monday, July 4th, marked the 15th birthday of Hotmail and Microsoft is not done celebrating. Remember when Hotmail was a simple email service that offered 2MB of storage? Remember when having an anti-virus scan for attachments was cool and unique? Microsoft has made some great innovations in the email arena with Hotmail, and hopes to continue making improvements.
Microsoft recently announced an updated Hotmail that utilizes some of the latest Outlook features. Hotmail has better keyboard shortcuts and numerous other enhancements to make your email reading experience better than before. Microsoft also claims that several new enhancements have made Hotmail 10x faster than before.
Microsoft is continuing to improve Hotmail and announced that they are only getting started:
Think we’ve taken a breather? Not a chance! It’s been an exciting 15 years, and especially this past year, but we’re still just getting started.
And since it was our birthday, we wanted to tell you about two new calendar features that provide more instant access to the things that matter to you. We’re adding a mini-calendar that’s similar to Outlook’s in the left pane of Hotmail so you can quickly see upcoming appointments and jump to a particular date.
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.
And if you’re looking for a particular email, we added a “go to” option that lets you easily get to messages from a particular date by clicking “go to” at the bottom of your message list. You can use the same control to get to messages from a particular sender when the message list is sorted by From.
So, check out the new changes, and let us know what you think. We hope you’ve enjoyed Hotmail over the last 15 years – and in hope you like the direction we’ve recently been taking.
We’re just getting started – there’s a lot more to come.
Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail
Microsoft also has a “short history” of Hotmail. Check it out here.
