5 Things You’Ll Actually Like About the New Hotmail

PC World — Hotmail and innovation: Those two words haven't been used in the same sentence for years. But when Microsoft (MSFT) launches an update to the online mail service (officially known as Windows Live Hotmail) sometime this summer, it'll include some features that are genuinely innovative, well-thought-out and useful.

As with Bing, it feels like Microsoft hasn't been content just to copy popular traits from its rivals, but find compelling new ways for people to interact with email. I've gotten a chance to play with the new service early and here are a few of my highlights:

1. New Inbox Views

These automatically generated filters help you find what really interests you in your inbox. The most useful is probably the "From contacts" view, which shows only emails from people in your contact directory. This does a pretty good job of isolating only the messages you really need to respond to, especially if you have all the people you work with regularly in your contacts list.

Another filter shows all your updates from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, while a third finds mail like newsletters and email blasts to large groups. And there are views that find all e-mails with photos or office documents attached or that contain shipping updates.

Of course, you can create some of these filters yourself in a service like Gmail, but lots of people won't go through the hassle. Microsoft has done a good job of recognizing what filters many people would want and building them automatically.

2. Sweeping Out the Junk

These days, most true spam - Viagra ads and porn come-ons - gets caught before it ever gets to your inbox. But you still get semi-spam messages: newsletters that you signed up for, but then found weren't that useful or coupons from a store you no longer shop with. With a little work, you could figure out how to unsubscribe, but Hotmail's Sweep feature makes evicting them from your inbox much easier.

You hover over the sender of a message and can choose to delete all messages, past and future, from that sender or, automatically move them to a different folder, if you want to keep them, but don't want them cluttering your inbox.

3. Active View

Active View, Microsoft's typically obtuse label, actually refers to very cool functionality. Say your friend sends you an e-mail about the latest YouTube video showing accidental damage to a man's nether region. Instead of getting just a link to the video, you see a thumbnail of the pole-vaulting disaster and can play the video in a popup window right in your inbox. In addition to YouTube videos, the system also supports Hulu videos.

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