Windows Live Wave 4: M1 released; Hotmail changes

By Kip Kniskern on September 12, 2009 6:51 PM

15 comments

We know Wave 4 is coming, and now thanks to WindowsLiveHelp.com, we know at least a few of the changes coming (here already?) to Hotmail. We don’t appear to be seeing any of them here, yet, do you?

In a post on August 28th (thanks mynetx for spotting this!) titled “New/changed features in Hotmail Wave 4 M1 Release”, we find out that M1 of Wave 4 was released August 31, and rolling out over the first few weeks of September. We haven’t seen anything else about these changes, but here they are, according to the Support Blog post:

Auto Refresh of Inbox: Inbox is refreshed when a user is logged into WebIM, instead of after 60 seconds.
Auto save Drafts: emails automatically saved to drafts as they are composed. Current auto save is set to 3 minutes
Keyboard Shortcuts: “Lots of keyboard shortcuts, including shortcuts to match both Yahoo and Gmail.” Here’s a list of the keyboard shortcuts.
Contact Picker Improvements:
- edit contacts in compose
- recent email data used in auto-complete and contact picker
- copy/paste enabled in IE
- a “verify recipients” feature added
Download all attachments: multiple attachments to an email downloaded together as a .zip file
WebIM Contact List: “view online contacts” added:

Mobile browser improvements: backend changes to improve mobile performance
Action Bar at bottom of page: Reply/Forward/Delete is now available from both the top and bottom of an email.

Posted in Featured, News | Tags: Hotmail, Wave 4, Web Messenger, Windows Live

Comments

http://www.liveside.net/members/BuciboLebo/default.aspx BuciboLebo

Is that what they spent almost a year developing?
http://www.liveside.net/members/nikhil_5F00_jain/default.aspx nikhil_jain

This really make feels very sad. To see these updates. I was wanting for wave 4, but it totally disappoint me alot..!
http://www.liveside.net/members/JSYOUNG571/default.aspx JSYOUNG571

No news yet on adding pictures to emails, no video messages for email, and no other themes. WOW!
http://www.liveside.net/members/trolane/default.aspx trolane

It is very sad to see how slow and miniscule updates are with these web based services. What happened to being agile and productive? Changes seen here would take no more than a week or less in a competant persons hands with a cleanly built system.
jntowers

I wouldn’t get too discouraged yet, I’m sure there are a lot of other features to come. These are some pretty basic functions that have been available elsewhere for awhile, so hopefully they’re just getting these out first. These are some of the basic things that have kept me from sticking with Hotmail fulltime over Gmail. Thinking positive here…
jntowers

sorry… had one more thought…

What still amazes me with the Windows Live team is the lack of communication. They seemed to be doing better, but this seems like something that would be blog-worthy on windowslivewire or something. Unless, of course, the rollout is being delayed internally – which is always possible since it seems nobody has these updates yet. Burying this info on windowslivehelp.com just seems random.
http://msftandthefuture.spaces.live.com/ Quikboy

Hopefully these changes aren’t the only changes. I want to see features and new stuff that outdo Gmail and Yahoo! Mail somewhere. Not just simple catch-up.

I wish the Windows Live team could be more robust like the Zune team. It’s only been about 4 years, and look at how much they’ve improved and changed over the years. Compared to the Zune team, Windows Live and MSN are real snails when it comes to updates.

You would think minor things like new themes and such would pop up without requiring a major wave. Instead we get more security fixes, more services & sites shut down, and just the frustration with waiting.
http://www.liveside.net/members/emiliano84/default.aspx emiliano84

i don’t think this will be full new functions of wave 4 i hope at most in these things:

-acces of ALL live services form top menu of live (in voice more) beta services too if are available and u can access to it

-attachments download with browser from mobile live mail

-calendar sync for mobile

-a video service like live photo (integrated with skydrive)

this is more difficult:
merge all similiar servicese and software to only one (live sync, mesh, skydrive, myphone…)
http://www.msgstuff.com absorbation

I wonder when details of other Windows Live services will emerge. I’m particularly interested in Windows Live Messenger.
http://www.liveside.net/members/zen/default.aspx zen

Even with Wave 4, Windows Live is still playing catch up with Google. The only Windows Live product that outguns Google is Messenger – that’s the thing that keeps me checking out some of the other Windows Live stuff once in a while.
jntowers

interestingly, the windowslivehelp.com article now says “end of September” instead of “mid September”
http://www.liveside.net/members/damaster/default.aspx damaster

@jntowers: Indeed, looks like they’ve updated the post. They’ve removed any reference to “Wave 4 M1″ in the post and states that the update started on August 31, 2009 and will continue until end of September.
damaster

I’ve got the Hotmail updates on two out of my three accounts. Very nice that I can now see online contact list in web messenger!

You’ll know you’ve got the update when you find the “© 2009 Microsoft | Privacy | Terms of use” bar in small font at the very bottom.
jntowers

@damaster: me too – didn’t even notice until i saw your post

messenger change is great, inbox refresh is great…

keyboard shortcuts are nice – and nice having multiple options, but seems incomplete as I still have to do a lot of going between the mouse and keyboard; and i’m not sure what “WLX” refers to on that list b/c I can’t get those to work?

One issue that’s a big one and I’m curious if you or anyone else is having – and I’ve tried this in IE and Firefox to make sure it wasn’t just Firefox. When the draft is auto-saved, it shows that there’s a message in the draft folder, but if you try and close the browser, or navigate away from the message in any way, the warning pops up that you’re going to lose the message. So when you navigate to the drafts folder, it’s gone. When you do a normal draft save by clicking, that warning doesn’t pop up. Kinda defeats the purpose of the auto-save if, when closed, it deletes the draft. It seems like there’s some backend trigger that the auto-save doesn’t hit, and so it treats it as if the message hasn’t been saved.
jntowers

in follow up to that last comment about the auto-save of drafts…

i crashed the browser, and it saved it just fine – which, i guess, is essentially the purpose of the auto-save – for those unexpected power blips or browser crashes… and i guess if you have the control to close the browser, then you have the control to manually click to save the draft when you get that warning message… if that makes sense

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