We’ve been reading our mail and all the comments you’ve made on the recent Windows Live Hotmail updates. While the new Hotmail works well for most of our customers, we’ve also been hearing from many of you here on the blog and through Windows Live Support who’ve had trouble. We’re in the process of addressing all the feedback and wanted to give you an update on the changes we’re making.

Over the last few weeks we’ve rolled out fixes that resolve many of the issues you’ve reported. These include problems when using a larger text size in the browser, viewing your favorite contacts, accessing Hotmail from Firefox on Linux, and problems opening some messages. These fixes have now gone out to everyone, so you shouldn’t continue to see these problems.

Our next update, in mid-December, will address how scrolling works. We’re making the new Hotmail work more like the Classic version for those of you with the reading pane turned off. When we moved to the new version we optimized for screen resolutions that were 1024x768 and above. In smaller resolutions like 800x600, we’ve seen cases where the browser scroll bars overlap the message scroll bars, making it harder to move through your messages. Our next update will fix this problem, and we appreciate your patience as we continue to work on this.

If you use a smaller screen resolution, you may have been seeing multiple scroll bars, like this:

But with the new fixes, you’ll soon see this instead:

Coming early next year, you’ll see yet another update, which will complete the transition to the new Hotmail. We’ll be changing the banner ad at the top of the page to a vertical ad on the right-hand side, which will allow you to see more messages and more of your personal folders on the screen at once. We’ll also be adding more themes, increasing the number of messages on each page, and embedding instant messaging with Messenger right into Hotmail.

We appreciate all your feedback and want you to know that it has been critical in our work to make Hotmail better. Thank you for using Windows Live Hotmail.

- The Hotmail team