Hotmail gets a revamp to fend off competition from Yahoo and Gmail

Hotmail users will soon be seeing updates to the popular free mail service, as Microsoft decides to revamp the service to fend off competition from rivals Google and Yahoo.

Windows Live Hotmail, to give it its full title, is still the world's biggest free email provider, boasting over 360 million members sending a total of eight billion messages a day. However, in the face of stiff competition from Google's Gmail service, and Yahoo's mail, Hotmail is taking the challenge to update its service. Users have changed the way they use their email accounts, from treating it as a stand-alone platform to send a few messages, to being part of a raft of online tools to connect with other people, and the updates - which will be rolled out from this summer - will reflect that. 

Updates include better security to filter out spam and warn of potential phishing attacks, and the ability to view and edit documents sent via Hotmail on online versions of Office - a new idea by Microsoft clearly intended to rival to Google's established Google Docs option. Also to be added are filters to view messages by conversation thread; or by source, so that shopping reciepts and delivery confirmations from Amazon can be grouped at the click of a mouse, as can Facebook alerts - the idea being to allow users to sort and filter messages by conversation thread or message type, rather than by individual messages. Additionally, an 'Active View' system will allow image attachments to be previewed in the Hotmail browser window.

With many of the updates already being offered by Gmail, Hotmail is really pulling even rather than staying ahead of the curve; but Microsoft should learn from Google's mistakes and take note of privacy issues when rolling out any new information-sharing features to its Hotmail users.