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It is now almost a daily occurrence that new information comes out about the upcoming changes to Windows Live Services. This time it is more info about Hotmail.

The most recent official voice from Microsoft is Brian Hall.  He is the General Manager of the Windows Live Business Group and in a recent Windows Team Blog post he mentioned three features in the upcoming release of Hotmail under Wave 4:

  • Removing text from the bottom of messages sent from Hotmail – We’ve seen a lot of feedback regarding the text that gets added to the bottom of email messages sent from Hotmail and some other email providers. In the image above, you can see an example of this text, “Hotmail goes with you. Get it on your BlackBerry or iPhone.”  We call this text a tagline, and we’d like to address this pretty simply – we’re getting rid of it.
  • Don’t open our email? We’ll stop sending it. If you aren’t engaging with our email, our goal is to stop sending it to you, except in the cases of critical account updates or service notifications where we don’t want you to be surprised. We’re also making our opt-out options more prominent.
  • More relevant email. Targeted email improves your experience by keeping you up-to- date on the upgrades, changes, products, and services you use. So we’re improving the relevancy of the email we send by taking into account which services you’re using and what you have or haven’t clicked in the past.

I think the most daring change is removing the tagline.  That will make an email from someone that originates on Hotmail theirs.  No ties to anything to be able to send that message to someone else.  Lacking control over the text has been frustrating for many people for quite some time.

Great work and we are all really eager to see these new features. Very soon we hope!

Read all of Brian’s post here – Hotmail respects your inbox.