shahine.com/omar/

It's nice to see one of our features in Windows Live Hotmail called out. We added the ability to unsubscribe to newsletter type email a while ago. All mass email senders should make use of the List-Unsubscribe Headers.

"Microsoft has recently made a small adjustment to its Windows Live Hotmail unsubscribe function that should mean good things for marketers.

Microsoft last August answered e-mail marketers’ calls to include an unsubscribe button in its interface so consumers will be less likely to mistakenly report permission-based commercial e-mail as spam.

The unsubscribe link appears in place of the report-and-delete button on some e-mails in Windows Live Hotmail, the free e-mail service replacing classic Hotmail."

[Source: Darren Straight]

Here is a screen shot of an email from a brick and mortar store that I've bought furniture from in the past. If I no longer want to receive messages from them it's a one click operation.

This is really cool and something a lot of folks at Microsoft has been working a long time on, but yesterday Penn announced that they have selected Windows Live @ edu for their students and alumni over Google.

ArsTechnica has some commentary.

One of the cooler thinks about our service is that with a little bit of technology and a lot of great work by the folks who manage the Windows Live @ edu program we're able to offer a pretty great set of services to any educational institution out there.

Winning over Penn was the most challenging of the Schools because they pretty much put the students in charge of deciding the relative merits of the different service offerings. There are a lot of schools already signed up for WL @ edu but Penn is the first Ivy League. As you can imagine, the others schools pay attention to who is picking who (us vs goog).

Well, it's been a REALLY long time since I've posted about stuff I'm working on. One of the reasons I haven't posted about work related stuff is that I stopped working on Mail back when the M8 milestone was starting up (last summer). I worked on another project, then went on parental leave, and when I returned there was an opportunity to work on Mail Hotmail again and I took it. Moving forward my team and I are going to be responsible for the core mail features for Windows Live Hotmail. Think of this as a big chunk of the "application" which in our case consists of the server and the rendered HTML or AJAX code. Hotmail is a really significant project and there are LOTS of people that support developing and maintaining the service so I don't want to trivialize the fact that there are many other moving parts and areas of responsibility that my peers manage as part of the service.

I had a lot of fun on the other project. A small part of me is sad that I'm no longer a part of the team, since it's filled with so many talented folks and a really amazing future. However, coming back to work on Hotmail reminds me just how much I like working in this space. I'm an e-mail nut at heart, and it's what I've done for the majority of my 8+ years at Microsoft... and it's what ultimately brought me out to the west coast.

Anyway, the team just finished releasing M10 to the entire site today. M10 is a milestone along a remarkable journey that started in 2004 when I joined the MSN Hotmail team. I'm really proud of the work the team has done, and the polish and performance found in M10. We wrote the product from scratch (practically zero code reuse from the current MSN Hotmail) on .NET inventing and using technologies along the way to deliver a rich and fast experience that leapfrogs our current free mail product. The challenges we faced and the things we learned are really profound.

In fact you might notice that Yahoo Mail beta seems to be taking a few cues from our playbook (ignoring their storage announcement for a moment). There are some hard and fast facts around performance of Rich AJAX applications that a small number of major services are dealing with. And I'm talking about services that need to scale to hundreds of millions of users (with tens of millions of logons) across thousands of servers in hundreds of markets and cities across the world. There are no wide spread "best practices" out there to borrow. There is a lot of hard work in finding the right balance between performance and richness and deploying a service to a world wide audience with very little downtime.

Anyway, I just wanted to write this post acknowledging the excellent work the team has done, and mention that I'm back working on a project that I helped start with a group of amazingly smart and dedicated folks. It should be a fun summer watching the user base grow.

PS - I'd like to point out that Windows Live Hotmail M10 was recently positively reviewed in PC Mag and received an editor's choice award (along with Yahoo).

What's more important, cool whizbang features or logging in every day and seeing the info you expect to see? While Hotmail Windows Live Mail has had it's share of problems over the years, one thing we've learned over time is that no mater what you do, if a customer logs in one day and doesn't see their email, nothing else matters at that point. It doesn't matter if the reason they lost their mail was because they didn't log in for the last x number of days before their account was deleted, or if a server blew up containing all their mail.

Trading off between investments in new stuff, and keeping the service running for your millions of users is not an easy decision. Sometimes you need to put things on hold and double up in your QoS efforts.

In fact, I remember a story some one told me a year or so ago. Over the holidays (when things were quiet at work) a man walked into our building in Mountain View hysterical that all his mail was gone. Luckily the receptionist got some one on our team to talk to him. In the end we were able to restore his mail . Don't ask me how.

I hope those 60 GMail users get their mail back (and hopefully it's only 60). It's probably not a fun time for the Googlers that are currently at the Googleplex figuring out how to undelete lots of deleted data.

Yesterday Hotmail turned 10 years old! Let's see, when Hotmail launched I was a sophomore in College, and was still using Gopher before discovering Mosaic, a crazy new GUI for browsing the WWW. I didn't get my own Hotmail account till October 17, 1998 (you can find out when you registered by visiting http://account.live.com).

Anyway, a big happy b-day to Hotmail and here's to the next decade!