New Hotmail presented today

Microsoft today presents what are likely to be the main changes to introduce to Windows Live Hotmail, its free web-based email service that will see a new version this summer.

Among the novelties are new tools and the possibility of “editing Microsoft Office documents within Hotmail’s own inbox”, the company anticipates in a statement.

According to the same source, the promised new tools include solutions to manage e-mail inboxes, facilitate the sharing of heavy attachments, such as photos, and simplify the viewing and editing of Office documents.

The changes in terms of sharing photos and documents – classified by the company as “one of the biggest changes” in the batch – include the possibility of sending attached documents up to a limit of 10 GB in a single message, being possible to add up to 200 attachments of 50 MB each to a single email.

The integration with other services is another of the new features announced, allowing to see “samples of videos or photos from sites such as Flickr, YouTube, etc. and to check the status of the attachments in real time, within the e-mails themselves”.

Another possibility associated with the integration of social networking services is the possibility to check updates on these services, accept friendship invitations or receive birthday notifications, for example, from the Hotmail inbox.

Integration with other webmail services, such as Yahoo and Gmail, is also guaranteed, allowing the forwarding of their messages to Hotmail.

The new version of the service will be available worldwide “in the middle of summer 2010”, guarantees Microsoft. However, it will be possible to check the presentation video through a website created for this purpose.

New Windows Live Hotmail