Beginning this month we'll see a number of improvements to Live Hotmail being implemented for all 250 million accounts.

The first change that'll be easily noticed is an increase in storage to 5Gb (from 2Gb) for free users and 10Gb storage for paying Live Hotmail subscribers. Remember that storage covers email, contacts and calendar information. More a little later on how you can make use of this free online storage.

Behind the scenes the Hotmail team have improved performance so we should start seeing a faster service. Note that if you access your Live Hotmail across a dialup connection it's best to stay with the classic version (you can always change your mind from the Options menu).

We've all got duplicate copies of contacts in our contact list and now Hotmail has a wizard to consolidate these contacts to tidy up things. For example, when we receive an email from Web Dot and click Add contact, Hotmail will check if Web Dot is already in the contact list and will add the new email address to those already stored.

Since the new version was released last year, Hotmail has become stringent in trying to protect us from ourselves by clearly warning us of suspicious emails, for example, by greying out any images in an email because that's one way spammers check if their mail has been received.

Live Hotmail also now has a feature that lets us directly report a phishing attack (phishing emails are those that appear to come from a bank asking for account information).

Hotmail uses similar filters to those of Microsoft Outlook (in some cases our Hotmail is filtered before we even see it to remove spam and phishing attacks) but you can teach the filters by reporting any suspicious email as "junk".

A couple of other new features include being able to accept a meeting invite from an Outlook user and have your calendar updated accordingly. You can automatically forward mail from one of your Hotmail accounts to another one (paid users have more options). If you want, you can turn off the Today page.

Finally, how are you ever going to use that 5Gb of storage? Well, email yourself any documents and photos you want to keep backed up is one way to start. Also have a look at using the filters to automatically put posts from different people in their own folders, especially if they're sending you family photos and you want to keep these photos stored safely.

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