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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Wednesday, June 23, 2004

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80 hour weeks...

For the past 5 weeks (other than a trip to Alaska planned a year ago) I have been living work, breathing work, and dreaming about work (not by design). And today the news is out.

Hotmail is aggresively moving to make storage a non issue any more (in light of gmail and yahoo's recent offerings). It's been incredibly fun, challenging and scary all at the same time. I'm really glad to be part of such a kick ass team... hotmail is going to be cool again!

Exective Summary of changes

  • Free users get 250 MB
  • Premium users ($19.99 a yr) get 2 GB of mail

In other news, Dick Craddock is joining my team as our Development Manager. This is so awesome. Dick worked on Internet Mail and News for the Mac, then Outlook Express, then became the Product Unit Manager for the Mac Internet Product Unit (which was merged into the Mac Business Unit) where we shipped OE 5 and IE 5 and rocked the house. He then left to work on MS TV and stuff, and is back in the e-mail game after taking a nice long sabbatical. Last week we had a little offsite in Redmond and it was funny how many former Mac folks were in the room...

Microsoft
Posted Thursday, June 24, 2004    Permalink    Comments [7]  View blog reactions

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Thursday, June 24, 2004 2:33:11 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Great news! I was always crazy about Hotmail.

I hope you guys have also included mail search like the gmail and yahoo guys. This could be the clincher.
Sanat Gersappa
Thursday, June 24, 2004 3:52:39 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I'm loooking forward to the new enhanced version of Hotmail. Thanks for all of the hard work and the effort.

While the new size increase is the most reported enhancement, I have not been able to find much info about other enhancements. This may not be the proper place to discuss this, but perhaps you can pass this on to your team.

Currently there is no easy way to set the charset= line in Hotmail. Most of the e-mail I read and write is in Japanese, but occasional also in English, Chinese, and Korean. The only way that I am aware of in Hotmail to set the charset line is to switch the interface language to the language that you wish to type in (With English being an obvious exception that works in all language interfaces). However, on occasion I need to type in Chinese and Korean, so I need to switch the interface language yet again and again. Also, there is no support for UTF-8.

I would be very grateful for the ability to manually set the encoding. By having the encoding linked with the interface language, it forces users to work in a language interface that may be less desirable and also restricts mixing several scripts together (without UTF-8 support). I set a few messages to Hotmail several years ago about this issue, but have never heard anything back.

Perhaps this has been addressed in the new revision. If so, I will be extremely happy. If not, I hope that your team can consider the issue.

Thanks for all of your hard work.
Dono
Thursday, June 24, 2004 5:01:22 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
so does that mean the interface is going to be scrapped too?

I don't give a shit about the gmail 1gb of space. Its the interface/usability/speed of gmail which I enjoy.

Unless yahoo/hotmail compete on THAT level, you guys are screwed.
Sean Malloy
Thursday, June 24, 2004 6:45:53 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Sean, yes we are aware of our design issues ;-).
Omar Shahine
Monday, June 28, 2004 6:58:22 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I use gmail for one month. I'm very impressed of its features:
- 1,000 megabytes (one gigabyte) of free storage
- Built-in Google search that instantly finds any message you want
- Automatic arrangement of messages and related replies into "conversations"
- Text ads and related pages that are relevant to the content of your messages

And works very quickly. I'm impressed very much.
Sony
Tuesday, June 29, 2004 7:19:18 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Please Please Please tell me you aren't working 80 hour weeks on nothing more that changing what should be a few config variables for mailbox size and then slapping in more disk array.
Angus
Sunday, June 12, 2005 2:22:01 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Now GMAIL have 2Gb email storage.
outlook express spam filter
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