By now everybody should have, or it isn't too far away, the latest update (milestone 10 or M10) to Live Hotmail - you'll know when you see the name change to Windows Live Hotmail above the Hotmail toolbar on the left of the page.

It's now easier to choose which view you want to use, either the classic view similar to the old Hotmail, or the new view of the full version in which you can place the reading pane, use drag and drop and lots of shortcut keys. There are now three places from which to choose which view you want to use: on the Today page, at the bottom of the Inbox, or from Options.

When you're on a slow connection, e.g. dialup, you'll want to switch to the classic view and it's easy to switch over to the full version when you're on a broadband connection.

For those using the classic view, the M10 update brings back the spell checker, the photo upload tool and bi-directional language support.

The Hotmail team have worked hard on comments from users and it's worth familiarising yourself with the safety bar, i.e., the tools provided to help make us aware of emails containing possibly dangerous attachments or emails that could lead to phishing sites.

For yonks Hotmail has been able to organise your mail into folders for you. This feature is particularly handy if you receive newsletter-type mail, e.g., latest prices for plane tickets, and don't want it cluttering up your inbox.

In classic view go to Options and in full Hotmail go to Options/More options to get to the section where you can organise mail to go into certain folders according to your own rules. Look for Automatically sort e-mail into folders under Customize Your Mail to start setting up things.

Firstly choose the button to add a new filter and the next page brings up the two steps to get Hotmail to sort your mail.

In Step 1 you've got a choice from the drop-down list of deciding which posts you want to filter. For example,  you might receive a newsletter each week from a certain email address. So you'd choose From address in the first text box, then contains in the second and you'd type in the email address of the newsletter sender in the third.

In Step 2, for our newsletter example, it would be best to create a separate folder into which each week's newsetter is automatically placed when it arrives. Enter a name for a new folder, click Save and you've finished setting up your first filter.

Note that there's a separate section, Junk e-mail, in Hotmail for you to deal with spam and junk email. webDotWiz recommends you set the junk mail filter to Exclusive and then all you need do is keep an eye out for the first post from someone you know whom you gave your email address to and that person is not yet on your contacts list.

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