Windows Live Hotmail recently released an update with a slew of new features including a storage space increase of a gigabyte, which puts the service ahead of GMail by several gigabytes. Yahoo Mail still leads the online mail storage race with unlimited storage.
But the Windows Live Hotmail update features quite a bit more than just a storage bump. Perhaps the most useful of the new features is the contact “de-duplication.” Now in Hotmail if receive an e-mail from, say Joe Longfellow, and click “add contact” but there's already a Joe Longfellow in your address book, Hotmail will give you the option to simply append the new address to the existing contact.
While that's de rigueur for any decent contact management app, very few online services seem to be capable of such feats.
Other notable new features include spam improvements, support for Hebrew and Arabic, a downsized header, and, my personal favorite, the ability to go straight to you inbox rather than the annoying MSN news page.
The Windows Live Team also claims that Hotmail is significantly faster, though I didn't notice anything spectacular in my testing this morning. That said, my account hasn't yet received its storage bump so perhaps the speed increase will only be noticeable after the full upgrade is applied to your account, something that will happen for all users over the next couple of weeks.
