Microsoft Begins Migrating Users To Hotmail Web Mail Service

Microsoft Corp. has closed the public testing period for Windows Live Hotmail and has begun a months-long process of migrating users to this major upgrade of its Hotmail Web mail service, the company will announce Monday.

The new Windows Live Hotmail service – which was launched yesterday in 36 languages – will be a critical cornerstone in the company’s online advertising strategy in the years ahead. The company is touting Windows Live Hotmail as the most significant upgrade to its MSN Hotmail service launched in 1996.

The company says that Window Live Hotmail – the result of input from over 20m beta testers – will deliver a safer, more powerful and productive email experience than previous versions with flexible access via the web, on a mobile phone or with an email client.

Later this month later this month Windows Live Hotmail users will be able to access their Windows Live Hotmail email and contacts for free using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Office Outlook 2007 via the new Microsoft Office Outlook Connector beta.

“We’re thrilled to deliver Windows Live Hotmail to the more than 280 million active MSN Hotmail accounts around the world,” said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft.

“Windows Live Hotmail represents an extremely compelling end-to-end email experience that makes it easy for customers to get best-of-breed email access across PCs, mobile devices and the web.

“Windows Live Hotmail is a cornerstone online service for Microsoft and a critical part of our online advertising business because email is a key point of influence for consumer purchases,” Berkowitz said.

Microsoft says the new version of MSN Hotmail will be more akin to the Outlook experience and users will be have click and drag capabilities and auto-complete capabilities.

Users who want to bring their MSN to their mobile phones or PDAs by going to http://mobile.live.com. The company also said that the new upgraded Windows Live Hotmail will ship with Windows Mobile 6.0, the forthcoming version of its software for smart phones.

The company added that in coming weeks it will release Windows Live Mail beta, a free consumer email client available via download that will be a successor to Outlook Express and Windows Mail on Windows Vista.

The thorny issue of spam email – estimated to be impacting 60pc of business inboxes of Irish email users – is also being tackled through a number of new features.

For example, when an email message arrives in the Windows Live Hotmail inbox after multiple safety checks, the safety bar at the top of each email message will give a visual cue of the status of the email. White indicates the email is from a known sender, yellow indicates the email is from an unknown sender and red indicates the email is potentially fraudulent.

By clicking on the “mark as unsafe” link, users can automatically delete junk email messages, block any future email messages from that junk e-mail sender, and report the junk email sender to Microsoft’s spam filters to help protect others.

In terms of personalisation capabilities, users have two choices: a classic Hotmail view or the latest Outloook-oriented view. Users will also be able change the view through adding different colour schemes or skins.

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