shahine.com/omar/

For fun I ran YSlow to find out how it rated Windows Live Hotmail's Performance according to Yahoo's rules.

The reason Hotmail got a 98 and not a higher score? We use ETags... correctly. Yahoo should update that rule since we use IIS and you can in fact sync your ETags across your servers.

Update: turns out that YSlow doesn't work well with Frames, hence the numbers above are actually not accurate (at least not for The Full version of Hotmail). Not sure if this is something that will be fixed in YSlow.

Here are the numbers using the "classic versions" of each site. By classic I mean traditional Web 1.0 HTML.

If we didn't get an F on the ETags I wonder what our real score would be.

Well, since returning to the Windows Live Hotmail Team after my parental leave earlier this year I have been working on one thing, and that's the release that we started rolling out to the site today.

Ellie has all the details on the MailCall blog. There are a few notable items about this release. The first is that this is the first time we have released an update to a non beta service (note that Yahoo and GMail still appear to be in beta...). Previously, every release before that had been to upgrade or improve the beta in some way. So in this case the bar was much higher in developing our next milestone.

Today on Windows Live Hotmail we are hosting about 200 million accounts. The remainder of the users are still on the older MSN Hotmail Service. Over the next few months we expect that number to continue to climb as the remaining users start to use Windows Live Hotmail as their main service.

The scale of the site is also far greater. When I first started working on Hotmail back in 2004 we were working on building out our first cluster that would eventually support Windows Live Hotmail, and today the sheer number of machines running our code is mind numbing.

Some of the features in this release that I'm excited about are:

• Forwarding: you can forward email between Hotmail accounts (free users) and outside Hotmail (paid users).
• Vacation Replies: when you go on vacation you can configure a vacation reply, and optionally have it only go to your contacts/safe list.
• More Storage, not that it matters to most users. Storage is a race to the bottom anyway, but still seems to capture the hearts and minds of the press and bloggers.
• Contacts De-duplication: Get for free what Plaxo charges $50 a year for. With de-duplication and live contacts, your contact store can always be up-to-date. Steve Kafka has the nitty gritty on the de-dup feature.
• Performance: We've made tons of performance improvements to both the Classic and Full experience.
• BiDi: check out the crazy screen shot above. I wish I could read and write Arabic, but I'm sure that our Arabic speaking and Hebrew speaking customers will be happy that our BiDi (Bi-Directional Text) version of Hotmail is now out of beta!
• Today Page: don't need gossip about Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears? If you are like me and never make it to Safeway to read this while waiting in line, you can get it on our today page, or NOT. For the first time evar, you can turn off the today page for good. Just another token to show our deep understanding for your complaints and the feedback we get . I haven't turned it off though as it usually serves a few minutes of conversation when I get home... my wife is usually impressed that I stay on top of the US Weekly style "news".
• Better Junk Tools: You can report phishing messages, mark messages as Not Junk and help us improve our filter even more.

There is one other surprise coming that I'll blog about before the end of the month.

BTW, if you want to migrate over to Windows Live Hotmail from your service provider, we've made it super easy.

At long last... experience Hotmail inside of Outlook.

What used to be a subscription only offering is now available to anyone that wants it. While Outlook used to have the ability to talk to Hotmail via DAV it was flaky and 2 years ago we no longer offered it to new users of the service.

Well the new Outlook Connector has a few notable features that you didn't get with the old DAV support:

1. uses DeltaSync, a Microsoft developed HTTP based protocol that sync's data based on change sequence numbers. This means that the server is stateful about the client. Whenever the client connects to Hotmail, the server tells the clients of any changes that happened since the last time the client connected. This is super efficient and allows us to offer the service to many users at substantially lower overhead than stateless protocols. This is the same protocol utilized by Windows Live Mail. It's similar in nature to exchange Cached Mode or AirSync, the mobile sync stack used by Windows Mobile Devices.
2. Sync of Address Book. Your Messenger/Hotmail contacts get stored in Outlook.
3. Sync of Calendar (currently premium only)
4. Sync of allow/block lists for safety/spam

I've been using the Outlook Connector for about 3 years now and it's one of the first things I install on a new machine. It lets me stay on top of my mail while at work.

Hope you enjoy rich client access to Windows Live Hotmail.

Oh, if Outlook isn't your cup of tea, you might try the new Windows Live Mail client download from http://get.live.com/betas. If you have ever used Outlook Express or Windows Mail, this is a great upgrade with a killer feature: Photo Mail.

This officially rounds out our mail story. You can now have access to:

1. http://mail.live.com - web based email
2. http://mobile.live.com - mobile web based email
3. Windows Live Mail - free desktop client based email
4. Outlook - desktop email
5. Window Live for Windows Mobile - mobile email on your Windows Mobile Device (WM6)

End to end, I think that's pretty impressive.

This are freaking hilarious.

Suspicious Male

Reading Pane

Hot Male

Drag & Drop

Back when I shipped versions of Mac Office it was obvious when you were done... it was also obvious when you could walk into a store and see a shrink-wrapped copy of your software sitting on a shelf. Man what a cool feeling.

Well, when you've continually shipped updates to a product over a 2 year period, you can almost miss the moment when you can say you are "done", but knowing that "done" is completely relative. You're never done and we'll ship an update to Windows Live Hotmail a couple more times this year (everything from small hotfixes to releases).

But... today is the day we are launching Windows Live Hotmail world wide. I've worked on this project since the very beginning and I'm really proud to have been a part of this first complete re-write of the hotmail frontend code base since its inception. It's been an amazing opportunity and one I'm glad I was fortunate to be a part of.

The best part of it all is how much I've learned from the folks I work with, and from the customers and beta testers that gave us feedback. We worked tirelessly the past few years to deliver something that our users want, and something that is architecturally sound...

We made a big bet on .NET and a lot of new Microsoft technologies along the way. We are running all of these things at a massive scale and have hopefully improved a lot of the technology and infrastructure that ends up shipping in lots of other products.

You can head on over to the Hotmail blog and read more.

One of the things I'm most excited about is that we are FINALLY going to deliver rich connectivity to Outlook 2003 & 2007 for FREE. As an Outlook user you will have a first class experience interfacing with your Hotmail account. I plan to blog more about this in the coming weeks. IMHO this experience will be unmatched by any of our competition.

Well I'm off to bed now, but tomorrow will be a fun day.

PS - if you look through all the team pictures on the hotmail blog you will find one of me reading a .NET My Services book. I thought that would be pretty funny.