Microsoft aiming to make Hotmail cool again

MICROSOFT Corp is trying to make Hotmail cool again.

The free web mail service soon will be switching to a new approach that Microsoft hopes will give Hotmail an edge over rival offerings from Yahoo Inc and Google Inc.

The upgrade, expected to be available in July or August, will automatically sort incoming messages into different categories devoted to users’ key contacts and internet social networks. It will also provide previews of incoming photos, videos and other material without having to open an attachment or click on a link.

Other tools are being added to make it less cumbersome to send photos, videos, documents and other attachments to email recipients. Another tweak is supposed to make it easier to sync Hotmail on mobile phones.

The new features are supposed to enable people to spend less time managing their inboxes and more time enjoying and digesting what’s in the messages.

Microsoft is hoping the added convenience will help overcome the perception that Hotmail was growing stale as Google and Yahoo added more bells and whistles to their free web mail services.

Even as it made relatively few changes, Hotmail remained the world’s most used service, with 360 million users. Yahoo ranks second, with about 284 million users followed by Google’s Gmail at 173 million users.

The new technology will detect when an email contains a photo attachment and automatically display a thumbnail of the image (or images) at the top of the message. Hotmail will provide similar previews when it detects links to photo-sharing sites Flickr and SmugMug or to video-sharing sites YouTube and Hulu.

A new insert bar will allow users to send up to 10 gigabytes – about 200 photos each containing 50 megabytes – by uploading them to Microsoft’s free online storage service Skydrive, where they can only be viewed by the recipients of the email.