05.07.07
WE DID IT!!! Windows Live Hotmail Has Officially Launched!
Today is a momentus day for Hotmail. We are rolling out Windows Live Hotmail (code named Kahuna… previously code named Tsunami until Dec. 2004) to the world! After about 2.5 years of hard work, we are opening up the doors for business. I wont get into the details of the product in this blog b/c our Mailcall blog post pretty much sums it up. But I will say that I am psyched that we’ve launched this gargantuan project, and I’m truly proud of the way we’ve embraced a customer centric product development process at Hotmail.
Also, its amazing how much work has gone into building Hotmail from scratch. The very first line of code was written by our devs, and we’ve now taken a vision that was first conjured up on a whiteboard 2.5 years ago and delivered it to over 280M users. (I still remember the meeting where a group of us sat in a conference room and listed a bunch of potential features on the whiteboard, then grouped them into major buckets, and began voting). The UI and features that are visible to end users only scratch the surface of what we’ve done. Here’s a quick and dirty list of what’s hiding underneath the hood:
- rearchitected the entire service from scratch,
- swapped out the backend storage infrastructure (literally swapping out old boxes for new ones)
- instrumented user actions,
- created new ways to serve advertisements,
- developed new advertising products,
- created a scalable and flexible mail platform to power email for universities and other partners,
- managed a large scale beta process with a continuous user feedback loop,
- redesigned our product development and deployment processes,
- streamlined our signup flows,
- opened up Outlook client access for ALL free users (coming very soon),
- created a Windows Live Contacts (subscribe to contact updates) service,
- created a new selection paradigm for email client applications (dynamic checkboxes) which has been eventually adopted by Yahoo Mail Beta,
- and released a new safety bar to educate users about the context of every mail that arrives in his/her inbox
Oh, and of course, rewrote the entire UI and released dozens of great features.
If you want to check out the latest, go to www.discoverhotmail.com and either sign up for a new account or upgrade to the Windows Live Hotmail service. Also, check out this video… it will bring you back to the days when free online email was a new, revolutionary service. Webmail is HOT again!
Chris (Milwaukee) said,
May 8, 2007 at 1:28 pm
I was recently testdriving Windows Live Hotmail.
I like where it’s going, but there are a few gripes…
1) The Contact “quicknames” that I use in regular Hotmail don’t show up in Live Hotmail. I use these to organize/view my contacts. Since it was a proprietary Hotmail item, I’d like this in the new Hotmail too.
2) Resizing columns doesn’t work. I don’t know if this is just a Firefox 2.0 thing or just doesn’t work at all. I’d like to be able to resize all of the columns (the ones on the left and the preview pane) to my liking.
3) I’m not able to show more than a small amount of messages in the new interface. It’ll work with “classic” view I think, but not the new view. I’d like to see at least 100 messages per page, or at least have the option to configure the number.
I would very much appreciate if you guys could take a look at this. Until then, I’ll stick with plain old Hotmail.
Regards,
-Chris-
Building Live Hotmail from scratch | Lorgor said,
May 8, 2007 at 11:26 pm
[...] Richard Sim, Senior Product Manager for Windows Live Hotmail posted interesting background building Hotmail from scratch. [...]
richard said,
May 11, 2007 at 8:57 am
Chris, here are responses to your questions:
1. we did away with quicknames b/c we found that very very few users ever used them. they were more confusing than helpful. with email address autocomplete, quicknames became a bit redundant.
2. that is a firefox thing only. its on our radar.
3. the Full view is framed in a single webpage so there is no scrolling. its like Outlook Web Access or any other thick client… once you introduce scrolling into a model like this, it screws up the user interface in many different ways.
Thanks for your comments. Hope you give WL Hotmail another try. I can assure you that once you get used to it, you’ll be much more productive than in the old Hotmail service.
Justin Drerup said,
May 14, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Will the new Windows Live Mail ever support nested folders? This may seem like a really little thing but would be of huge benefit to me as I feel it makes organising your mail significantly easier. Yes I do like the improved search features however sometimes it is easier to find your mail using a hierarchical folder structure.
StormX’s Place » Rebuilding Hotmail from scratch said,
May 15, 2007 at 5:44 am
[...] Sim, Senior Product Manager for Windows Live Hotmail posts an interesting and comprehensive list of what the Hotmail team has accomplished since starting the project almost two and a half years [...]
David Okoli said,
May 16, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Richard, regarding the quicknames, I unfortunately seem to have fallen into the bucket of the few users who used it – I used them for 99.9% of emails that I sent and it is a pain to open up two windows to copy an email address of friends whose emails are nothing like their emails.
Not to burst your bubble, but If I had known that quicknames had been done away with I would NOT have upgraded. It was one of the best usability features.
David Okoli said,
May 16, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Sorry, I meant to say, “is a pain to open up two windows to copy an email address of friends whose emails are nothing like their real names.”
Peter said,
May 29, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Congrats on the launch, now we are looking forward to the next beta
.
I have a quick question though. Is there a possibility to upgrade a live account to a custom domains live account?
The reason I’m asking is that I recently bought a domain and I want to use custom domains, however I had my hotmail account for a long time and a lot off info is stored with it, like connect profile etc which I wouldn’t want to loose. So I would be great if I could just upgrate, migrate the account to the new email address. And if there isn’t such an option will it be in the near future? I’d like to move to the new address asap but I’d wait for such a migration option if it was in the pipeline.
Regards,
Peter
Stuart said,
July 30, 2007 at 8:25 am
Hi there,
Thanks for this informative blog! I have to admit that I too loved the quicknames feature and realllllllllly wish it was still there. I really dislike having to type out the full email each time, and as a previous post mentioned, have lots of friends who have quirky email addresses that are hard to remember.
Any feedback you might be able to provide would be most welcome!
Thanks again.
Chris said,
September 6, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Is there anyway to retrieve the quicknames that I was using before? I used them exclusively since using the first last name listing always listed my contacts by first name – so I never used those fields. Now without any quicknames, I have 333 contacts, about half of which I have no idea who they are. Is there anyway to change back? Anyway to pull up the quicknames?
Please help!!!
Michael said,
September 9, 2007 at 9:01 pm
I too seem to be one of the “very few users” who depended on quicknames for ease of addressing emails. Is there anything on the horizon that will fix this problem?
Thanks.
cindy f. said,
September 10, 2007 at 11:37 am
I also used the quicknames. I now have tons of email addresses in my contacts that I have no idea who they belong to. I am very frustrated.
IF I had know I was going to lose them, at the very least, I would have done some screen prints of my Contacts List.
Also, while it is great feature to have auto-complete for the “To:” field, it only works for those emails that have a legitimate name connected to it. E.g., my parents email was quickname only, when I begin to type their last name, I get a list of ONLY the two relatives that I had names set up for.
Please, is there any way I can get a copy of my old contacts list?
I have been a “paid” member since 1999, and had a free account before that.
Thank you.
alice said,
September 11, 2007 at 2:57 am
yes i too am one of the ‘few people’ who depended on quick names as a time saver and had i known that in transfering to live mail i would loose my favourite feature i would have held off for as long as possible maybe even looked for a new email provider while i knew who my contacts were!
i am very dissapointed in this loss, can it be added now as i am sure there are many people who would apreciate this, and maybe if you had a simple explaination others would also find it useful who did not know it exsited or it’s purpose
thanks
John said,
September 16, 2007 at 3:10 am
Please bring back quick names feature – seems like there are more than 99% of us who relied on it – I am lost without it you could have at least warned me it was going & i would have done a back up so i could take my names & adresses with me when i switch to a more user friendly ????
Please restore this feature!!!
Soon-to-be-former Hotmail user said,
September 17, 2007 at 1:42 am
It sucks, period. I’ve already deleted two accounts; I’m now working on transferring the third. Congrats on a piss-poor change that, if you do a Google search, over 90% of Hotmail users hate.
Bob said,
September 18, 2007 at 7:02 pm
So Richard you say you worked at this for 2.5 years? Are you serious? You must have taken a shitload of coffee breaks. Hotmail may not have been the be all and end all of e-mail but once you got used to it then it wasn’t all that bad. I don’t find it very user friendly at all. I can’t resize columes in Firefox or IE and I must be one of the so called very few who used quicknames. One other thing where the hell are the headers? If I wanted to find out where an e-mail came from it was easy the IP address was right there in the header as soon as I opened the message up. Now apparently I have to right click on the message and click on VIEW SOURCE and then search through the whole source code of the page to find the IP. After a few minutes of fruitless searching I gave up. Can I get a job doing what you do? I’m pretty sure I could have screwed it up in 2.5 weeks and saved hotmail all the overtime.
maggie said,
September 20, 2007 at 6:44 am
I too completely relied on quicknames, this is incredibly frustrating and time consuming. Does anyone have more info on this?
wish i could leave hotmail now said,
September 20, 2007 at 7:37 am
please bring back the quickname.
this is unbelivable how could hotmail distroy life of people
Disappointing said,
September 22, 2007 at 12:05 am
I wonder how many users were forced into this “upgrade”?
I think that might give a clue about how unpopular the new interface is.
Richard said,
September 22, 2007 at 11:50 am
Sorry folks, i’m no longer with Hotmail. The best way to provide feedback is to go to http://mailcall.spaces.live.com/ and leave a comment there. Thanks!
Considering Switching to Gmail said,
September 27, 2007 at 11:30 pm
I, too, surprise surprise, am one of the “very very few.” Please bring back Quicknames! This is absurd.
George Sand said,
September 30, 2007 at 2:41 pm
PLEASE REVIVE THE QUICKNAMES. The popup where it fills in the email that you are talking about is not working. It seems to me that there are not that few people that actually used quicknames; there are quite a few, and those who did use it are pretty loyal as you can see from above.
Alan Gabehart said,
October 10, 2007 at 11:54 am
What were you thinking??? Where are the QUICKNAMES???
My LONG list of contacts was organized by QUICKNAME. Now it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Why weren’t QUICKNAMES just moved into the NICKNAME field?
I have certainly lost my enthusiasm for HOTMAIL.
Shawn Austin said,
October 15, 2007 at 6:26 pm
i would really like to know how to get my old hotmail back ASAP!
this quickname situation is causing a lot of problems for me too!!!!!!!!!
i need the quicknames or my old hotmail back asap.
please help.
someone?
samantha oh said,
October 20, 2007 at 10:26 am
Yes indeed. How very frustrating. I just got switched to Live earlier. Guess I am also one of the ‘very very few people’ too. And could you care to elaborate as to why the Hotmail team deemed it as ‘confusing’? Also, how can Quicknames be ‘redundant’ when it is clearly an option? (ie users can choose to use AutoComplete or Quicknames)
These are obviously excuses to make up for your laziness.
Moses said,
October 24, 2007 at 1:05 pm
The quickname problem is quite absurd. I also used them, and now I feel like I’ve lost half of my contact info. You really need to do something about this problem. This is a big, big, big deal.
Paula said,
October 27, 2007 at 11:29 am
PLEASE BRING BACK QUICKNAMES!!!
Mike said,
November 5, 2007 at 7:32 pm
The lack of Quicknames in this new version is quite disappointing.
There are certainly more people out there who relied on this key feature.
Please add it back in as soon as possible.
ananda said,
November 6, 2007 at 11:08 pm
quicknames was a mandatory field in the last version that is why i used it. i used contacts as my address book and now have about 50 phone numbers i don’t know who they are. new version is fine i just need to get the old one back to print out the details
Chris said,
November 15, 2007 at 1:53 pm
My regular hotmail account was automatically switched to W L Hotmail. The PROBLEM is that I had all my contacts organized by Quickname. I never filled in first and last names, only Quickname info. Now I have a couple of hundred email addresses with no idea who half of them are.
I want, I need, if I thought it would get me anywhere I would also demand – my Quicknames back. Please help!
Even if I had to manually type in the Quickname info into the new Nickname space I would, but I would need my Quickname list with the corresponding email addresses first.
Vicky said,
November 16, 2007 at 5:28 am
I hate the new version. Am looking to go elsewhere now. All my Quicknames gone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Unbelievable
Vicky
tom said,
November 17, 2007 at 7:08 am
the doing away with quicknames has totally buggered me. i live in china, run a school and many of the people have chinese or else email adresses unconnected with their names. i have now lost many important adresses. any help would be much appreciated.
tom
Annoyed said,
November 18, 2007 at 8:44 pm
I, too, used quicknames for EVERYTHING. Now they aren’t recognized. Thanks. I was forced into the upgrade- I held off as long as possible. It’s awful. What a monumental screw-up.
Mark Fredericks said,
December 15, 2007 at 9:31 am
I had to run a system recovery program. When I got back on line I couldn’t
retreive my old “Hotmail” messages. What gives?
JohnPaulLyle said,
February 5, 2008 at 10:13 am
Has the q been answered re: retrieving old quicknames? I too am a bit screwed.
newmamak said,
February 10, 2008 at 10:25 am
I just realized that the quicknames are missing!! Guess I’m a little late on this one.
Anyway, looks like you can go back in and re-assign them….but what a pain!!!
I can’t believe we were in the minority! There must be some other explanation. Who wouldn’t use quicknames….at least some of the time…
tonia said,
March 15, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Well they took a working program and trashed it. How surprising!!!!!
First forced to buy WINDOWS VISTA on all new computers which gobbles up memory and runs so slow its not funny…..Now forced to use WINDOWS HOTMAIL LIVE….Which is unfriendly and has no option for full header. Because my view source does not give me a header with ip address. It only acts like it is in constant load mode and never pulls up the page.
GOOD JOB FOR BREAKING SOMETHING THAT WAS NOT BROKE!!!!!!!!!!
VISTA IS FLAWED AND NOW SO IS HOTMAIL. MICROSOFT JUST KEEPS GOING DOWN HILL.
So come guys you don’t need to be patting yourselves on the back because all you did was go back in time where these programs work slower if at all.
Signed leaving hotmail behind. Saving for a MAC. Can’t wait to throw this computer and it programs in the garbage where it now belongs.
Shane said,
March 16, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I too have become really angry with hotmail. It was already a very basic system and was slow sometime, but now it’s just unusable. ALso I can’t believe that there is NO WAY to get more than 25 messages per page. I have thousands of messages and it’s not going to happen that I surf through all the pages. I hate you hotmail and windows and how you make people upgrade with no choice at all, with all the money you have you can’t afford to leave a choice to people???????
Can someone tell me if there is a not too difficult way to tranfer you accounts to gmail or something similar? Some contacts I have no way of actually being able to get through that might not update their records I do not wish to lose. Is there any way to actually doing this whole transfer?
Brian said,
March 18, 2008 at 9:57 am
I’ve just arrived here trying to find out what happened to my old quicknames list. I never asked to change to the Live program! Now I have useless list of people I will never mail tp on the right, and have to go to the Contacts list and try and find exactly how my “true” contacts were saved. What a disgraceful change!.
Akhtar said,
April 21, 2008 at 3:16 am
thanks bob hahahhahha
Akhtar said,
April 21, 2008 at 3:17 am
mother fucker good information you gave me you know i was looking for the source to track people down ..ahahahahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
hannah said,
April 24, 2008 at 5:49 am
I want the old hotmail back!! I hate the new live one. please can we have it back????
valena said,
May 28, 2008 at 6:21 am
I’VE RECENTLY UPGRADE TO WINDOWS LIVE,AND HAVE LOST ALL OF MY INFORMATION IN HOTMAIL.COM HOW DO I GET BACK TO MY HOTMAIL.ACCONT I HAVE IMPORTANT INFORMATION IN THERE
Bill said,
July 6, 2008 at 2:57 am
Good thing I can still use OE for http mail because Live Mail sucks.
Davey said,
September 3, 2008 at 7:35 am
I liked it better the old way. The new hotmail is wayyyyyyyy tooo slow.
kamal said,
September 10, 2008 at 7:44 am
Hi,
can any body tell how to get back the old mails form hotmail, i am not able to see any of my old mails as its update to live hotmail.
if any once know please send a mail to me: kkpati_mac@hotmail.com
marty said,
October 21, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Idetest this new form of hotmail I have lost a lot of friends e mail addresses and it takes an awful lot longer to send by the time you fiddle about with it. I think I will be changing in the near future.
Harry said,
November 8, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Please bring back Quicknames because almost all of my contact are in quicknames, and now I spend so much time to look for name and address.
I may as well move to Gmail to be more productive.
Doug said,
November 13, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Argggg, why can’t Microsoft leave working technology alone? I used to be able to toggle on an option to see full headers….now I’m supposed to look through 5 pages of source code? Can I please schedule a cage match with the designer of this crap? We can do pay per view. If I win then you switch back to features that people want.
Brad said,
December 12, 2008 at 7:26 pm
I’VE RECENTLY UPGRADE TO WINDOWS LIVE,AND HAVE LOST ALL OF MY INFORMATION IN HOTMAIL.COM HOW DO I GET BACK TO MY HOTMAIL.ACCONT I HAVE IMPORTANT INFORMATION IN THERE
jeremy said,
March 25, 2009 at 1:22 am
how do in get back into my old e-mail account with windows live
jeremy said,
March 25, 2009 at 1:23 am
how do i get back into my old e-mail account with windows live
S Bray said,
June 1, 2009 at 6:53 am
I lost all my nicknames when I was transferred (without requesting it) from HotMail to Live HotMail. I have had to type them all in again.
In addition, it looks like a nickname can only have 8 characters. I have, for example, nicknames sophie_g and sophie_g_w but the same email address is selected for both.
As for restricting the sorting facility when the number of messages exceeds 5000, how stupid is that ?
Thanks Microsoft for breaking a very basic, but working, email program.