Hotmail revamped by Microsoft

Microsoft has taken the scissors to Hotmail and given it a haircut that the company hopes will stop all the kids laughing at it in the playground. There's a whole host of new features, including the ability to view messages in a thread, and a function that lets you 'sweep' unwanted email out of your inbox.

A majority of the additional features seem to only be there to let Hotmail continue to compete with Google's rapidly-expanding Gmail service. There's a better search box, no doubt powered by innovations from Bing. There's the aforementioned message threading, where back and forth messages between a group of senders are clustered onto one page. There's storage in Microsoft's SkyDrive for attachments, and unlimited storage in the mailbox itself.

There's in-line viewing of multimedia links. If someone sends you a YouTube video or a Flickr set, then Hotmail will give the content to you right there in the message -- not forcing you to click through to an external page. Best of all, though, is the ability to edit Office documents within email messages - taking advantage of Office 2010's sharing features. If someone sends you a spreadsheet, or a presentation, you can tweak it and send back a link to the attachment stored on SkyDrive, rather than the document itself.

Elsewhere, there's the ability to star messages, and to apply "flags", which don't just rhyme with Gmail's tags -- they do pretty much the same thing. There's a "Hotmail Highlights" view for your inbox, which shows you at a glance any emails from your friends, social network notifications, package tracking emails, calendar items and birthday reminders. There's also an interface that's more text-based than before, which will please people who prefer simplicity to icons.

On the security front, there's an improvement in the spam filters that Microsoft reckons can cut down the amount of unwanted and malicious emails in your inbox to only about 4% of total messages received. There's the ability, already offered by Gmail, to identify trusted senders with a distinctive logo, and full-session SSLencryption if you want it. Rather neatly, Microsoft's also offering the option to text you a single-use password for using at public machines that you don't trust.

For mobile phone users, the inbox has been redesigned for touch input, and you can access filters, message previews, offline viewing, conversation threading and the ability to flag messages from your handset. Back on the desktop, there's access to Windows Live Messenger from the inbox, along with the ability to chat to people on Facebook, and you can update your Facebook and Windows Live Messenger status from the Hotmail homepage. 

The new features are rolled up in a package called Hotmail Wave 4, which isn't yet available to the general public. The roll-out begins in mid-summer, but you can get a full preview of what the new service is going to offer by heading over to hotmailpreview.com.