Microsoft rolled out its long-awaited upgrade to Hotmail last week, finally converting all of its hotmail users to Windows Live Hotmail users. With the new digs came more storage space (2GB), and thus began the slow and arduous process of migrating its estimated 280 million users (I wonder how many of those are fake spam accounts) over to the new interface and new features. The new Windows Live Hotmail has an entirely new look and feel, and brings features that Microsoft Outlook users will find familiar to the browser. It functions equally well in Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Microsoft is not forcing its users to migrate to the new interface at this time, although they’re planning to give their users the option to upgrade and move to the new Hotmail for now. Over time, all users will eventually be rolled into the new system, it’ll just take its sweet time. Personally, I’ve been using the new Windows Live Hotmail for a while now, and of all the features that I’m most impressed with are the improved junk mail filters – which have managed to whittle down the masses of mail that I used to get to my Hotmail account down to a handful of messages a day that are easily cleaned out. You used to be able to “report” junk mail to Microsoft to have it added to their global filters, but it seems that feature has gone sadly missing. Now you can only mark items as “unsafe.”

Also, Microsoft has gone a long way to integrate the service into its Windows Live suite of services, with Windows Live Search, Live.com, Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live One Care, and more all within one click of Windows Live Hotmail. I have to admit however, that personally, as much of an improvement that Windows Live Mail is, users still have to suffer through hideous banner ads (although far fewer now than before) to get to their mail and still suffer the same old spam and junk mail problems that the old Hotmail had to suffer.

All in all, the interface is a huge improvement and the future of Hotmail is very bright. I certainly miss Hotmail from its pre-Microsoft days when I felt it was at its strongest and most receptive to its customers (my first email account ever was a Hotmail address, back in 1996) but Microsoft is putting a lot of energy and effort into its flagship webmail service. Even so, with all of the improvements and all of the fanfare, all the new storage, I have to worry that the only people who will be around to enjoy all of Microsoft’s hard work will be spammers, scammers, and the millions of people who used to use their Hotmail accounts but have since moved on to greener pastures like Yahoo! Mail and GMail while waiting for Microsoft to get its act together.

[ PC World :: Microsoft Rolls Out Upgrades to Windows Live Hotmail ]