MindComet

Hotmail Revamps Usability Features; Declares War on Newsletters

Hotmail claims that a good 75% of their spam complaints consist of legit email, most of which are newsletters and / or sales offers. Because of this, they are classifying this email as “graymail”. Hotmail recently explained their reasoning behind this on their blog. See their piechart breakdown of what their average user’s inboxes consist of.

So what Hotmail plans on doing is creating a “Newsletter” category, which emails will filter into automatically. How do they determine which emails are newsletters exactly? They plan on using their “Smartscreen” technology, which they claim to have a 95% success rate.

This may be a little troublesome for us email marketers. I have a feeling open rates for Hotmail users will drop briefly, but only until Hotmail users get used to the new automatic filtration process.

Along with their newsletter filtering process, they’re also unveiling a new unsubscribe process which is independent from the CAN-SPAM compliant links within emails. See the screenshot below for what users will see:

Another cool feature they’ve announced is Sweep, which is a part of Scheduled Cleanup. This feature basically removes all previous marketing messages from a specific sender, only leaving the most recent email in your inbox. The rest are filtered out into a different folder. Check out the video below:

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the new Hotmail. It’ll be interesting to see if any other major ISPs adopt similar tactics to keep users’ inboxes cleaned up by default. Personally, I think this is a little too intrusive on Hotmail’s part, but I suppose they have their reasons. What do you think?

Read more about their new features on their blog.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Oct. 07, 2011

Hotmail Kind-of Sort-of Announces HTML5 Video Support

So Hotmail now supports HTML5 video in email. This is a major development in the video-in-email saga, but it’s not a bullet-proof solution… yet.

Once the email is opened and images are displayed, the user must right-click on the video and select Play. This is due to Hotmail stripping out the <video> tag by default. Unsurprisingly, IE 7/8 doesn’t support HTML5 video yet, so you must have fallback content (such as an image) in place for users browsing the web with IE. Safari does not allow for right-click enabled playback, so fallback content is completely necessary here, as well.

Ros at CampaignMonitor brings up a good point in regards to autoplay in that having a video automatically play in users’ inboxes is likely to be a huge annoyance and will ultimately be a great way of encouraging users to unsubscribe. Food for thought.

All in all, this is not a solution that has been fully-realized, but it is only a relatively short matter of time before its fleshed out to the point where videos in email is viable and worth pursing in future efforts.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 20, 2011

Microsoft’s Hotmail Update: Social Media & SPAM-Centric

Microsoft recently unveiled a new look & feel to Hotmail including additional features focused on eliminating inbox clutter and social media. Here are a few key takeaways:

Hotmail Highlights:
This is a dashboard breaking down emails from your contacts, social networking sites, flagged emails and any upcoming events you’ve marked. They’re more or less built-in filters from the get-go. Nicely done.

Filters:
There are also filter tabs that sort out all of your inbox messages based on the criteria of the filter. On-the-fly sorting.

Categories / Quick Views:
Photos, Shipping Info, Documents. The most common emails sent to you will be sorted out automatically based on their contents.

Sweep:
Most importantly, Microsoft has implemented a “Sweep” feature that allows users to remove clutter from their main inbox. For email marketers, this means that your campaigns may suffer with Hotmail users.

Trusted Senders:
You can boil this down to being Microsoft’s equivalent to Goodmail. They pre-approve specific senders and IP addresses for users to ensure delivery, complete with a safety logo next to the subject line.

Their SPAM handling techniques are quite interesting, too. They’ve developed a way of sorting out legit email that you may have signed up for unintentionally (which they dub “graymail”) and actual SPAM, which they’re calling “SmartScreen”.

Most of the updates on the surface seem to be “too little too late” to covert a Gmail user, for instance. But the advances of the new Hotmail user experience as a whole makes the argument that email is further planting itself as the hub for all social communication online. Unfortunately, I don’t think these fundamental changes to Hotmail will go over well with their users, since they skew older and spend less time online. But nonetheless, it’s progress. It’s one step forward and not two steps back (*ehem* Outlook 2007, *ehem*).

There are more features listed on their preview page including Office and cloud storage implementation. It’s a definitive step in the right direction for Microsoft & Hotmail and I’m curious to see what they release next.

So what do you think this means for email marketing? If these features are widely adopted by Hotmail users will email campaigns of the future just be “swept” away, overlooked to never be opened again? I think it’s a definite possibility and one that deserves discussion. Comment below if you have any thoughts.

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 17, 2010

The Hotmail / Firefox Line Break Issue Is Resolved

Have you ever come across the consistent issue of line breaks in your email design in Hotmail using Firefox?

One consistent annoyance I’ve always encountered has been testing an email in Hotmail with Firefox. For some reason, this combination of client and browser generates horizontal line breaks in emails. I never knew why… until now.

After some digging, Smith-Harmon has discovered that a simple bit of code is the purest remedy for this issue. At the top of the email (before the opening TABLE tag), make sure you include this:
<style>img {display: block;}</style>

It’s that simple. You can also accomplish the same effect if you code each image individually with the “display: block” property / value. For example:

<img src="images/header.jpg" style="display: block;" />

Kudos to Smith-Harmon for this useful shred of knowledge!

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Mar. 02, 2010

Windows Live Mail - Email Offline

Instead of fixing their inherent bug with Firefox, it seems like Hotmail is focusing their attention on accessing your email offline.  They’ve recently released a new client-based beta version of Windows Live Mail that allows users to access their email without being online.

They boast that it includes “everything you’ve loved in our existing free email clients” such as Outlook Express.

The new client features:
Access to your hotmail inbox, folders and contacts.
Any changes made offline will be synced once you’re connected to the internet.
Multiple account view.
Access not limited to your Hotmail account; you can also use it with any other email account.

Read the development team’s blog here.
Download the program here.

If you currently use this, or have used this in the past, please comment below.  I’d love to hear some feedback on this.

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 07, 2007