New features coming to Hotmail Wave4 M1 release

Lots of new features is coming to the Windows Live Hotmail Wave4 M1 release. These updates have started on August 31st, and will be rolled out in stages over the coming weeks and will be completed all over by September end. This has been posted by a Microsoft employee at the Windows Live Solution Center. But I haven’t heard anyone getting these updates yet.

Here’s the complete list as posted at solution center:

Auto Refresh of Inbox -

If a user is logged into WebIM, their inbox will automatically refresh. Currently this is set to 60 seconds.

Please note that customers currently will not have an option to change the refresh interval or turn off this option.

Auto save Drafts -

Emails are now automatically saved to the drafts folder while a user is composing them. This is currently set to 3 minutes.

Please note that customers currently will not have an option to change the save interval or turn off this option.

Keyboard Shortcuts -

Lots of keyboard shortcuts, including shortcuts to match both Yahoo and Gmail. A new page in Options to choose what type of shortcuts you'd like to use. (A detailed post on keyboard shortcuts soon)

Contact Picker Improvements -

Users can now edit contacts in compose, recently e-mailed data used in auto-complete and contact picker, copy/paste enabled for IE, verify recipients enabled

Verify recipients: When the user types in an email address, upon completion of the email address, Hotmail verifies if the email address is "valid".  If the recipient is bad, it is flagged "Red" and the user can edit the entry. When the user hovers over the email address, we will show a tooltip that explains the email address is bad.

Download all attachments -

If there are multiple attachments on an email, they can now be downloaded together as one zip file.

WebIM Contact List -

Buddy list of online friends now available from the WebIM Dropdown

Mobile browser improvements -

A number of backend changes to improve performance on mobile devices/browsers

Action Bar at bottom of page -

Reply/Forward/Delete is now available from both the top and bottom of an email 

So these are the updates which will be rolled out in the new version of Hotmail Wave4 M1. As you can see these are all very practical and useful updates and will further enhance the Windows Live Hotmail. Hope we will start seeing them soon.

(Source: New/changed features in Hotmail Update)