So back when IE9 beta launched last year, Hotmail was quick to jump on the bandwagon and provided jumplist support in Windows 7. However with IE9, jumplist is only one part of the new  “Pinned Sites” feature. The other part, the notification icon, was just rolled out to all Hotmail users today according to the Inside Windows Live blog:

This week, we’ve been working on taking the next step and supporting notifications. Some of you may have seen this in the past few days, and we’re finishing the release of this feature today. This means when you’re signed into Hotmail and you’ve pinned it, we’ll show you a notification of how many new messages have arrived since you last checked your inbox.

This works like the mail tile in Windows Phone: the icon updates to show the count of messages that have been delivered since you last did something in Hotmail, and it clears when you do something in Hotmail like visit your inbox or read a message. So, now I can leave Hotmail open in the background while I do other work, and I can tell at a glance whether I have new mail.

If you’re using IE9 with Windows 7, you can try this now by pinning Hotmail to your taskbar. One note though, if you had it pinned before this update, you’ll need to unpin and re-pin to get the new feature.