Windows Live team blog archive

Did you know that you can do mail faster and easier with features that Hotmail recently added to allow for more productivity with e-mail?

Here are seven ways to be more productive that were added in recent months:

(1) Auto-complete.

Hotmail auto-completes as you type e-mail addresses in the “To:” line when you’re composing a new message. We’ve made Hotmail smarter so that contacts you’ve recently e-mailed will appear closer to the top of the auto-complete list.  For example, if you have 10 Michaels in your address book, but always e-mail Michael Z, he will appear at the top of the list.

(2) Contact picker.

Alternatively, we realize that some prefer to use the contact picker to add recipients to messages. We’ve improved this feature, too. When you click on the “To:” button in Hotmail while composing a message, Hotmail will show your contact list as it did before, and with the new improvements, more recent contacts will appear higher in the list to help you more efficiently find and add e-mail addresses to your messages. 

(3) Don’t Delete; Just Edit. 

Mistype an e-mail address?  No need to delete it; you can now edit the addresses by clicking on the “edit” icon next to the e-mail address.

(4) Auto-save.

As you draft your e-mail message, Hotmail will automatically save your message to the drafts folder periodically. This way, if you accidentally navigated away from the page before you finish your message, you won’t have to start from scratch again.

(5) Download all attachments together.

To make receiving multiple attachments easier for you in Hotmail, we’ve added the ability to down download all attached files as a Zip file so you won’t have to take the time to download each attachment one-by-one.

(6) Quickly reach out to your IM friends/colleagues from within Hotmail.

In three simple steps, you can begin chatting with your friends:

a. Sign-in via the Messenger link on top right corner of your inbox

b. Click “view online contacts” to see your buddy list

c. Click on contact to start a chat!

As an added bonus, Hotmail will automatically refresh your inbox (message list and folder count) when new e-mail arrives while you’re signed into web-based IM!

(7) Keyboard shortcuts.

You can save you time when you use Windows Live Hotmail, so we’ve now added more to the list. Give these a try!

If you prefer Gmail or Yahoo! Mail’s shortcuts, you can change your setting to use those instead (Click on the Options drop-down, then More options. In the “Customize your mail” section, click on Change keyboard shortcuts).

We hope these updates will help you e-mail more efficiently!

– The Windows Live Hotmail Team