shahine.com/omar/

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.