Microsoft Bumps Hotmail to 5GB Free Storage

The latest round of upgrades for Microsoft's web mail client include more storage, new languages, better performance, and other goodies meant to appease advanced users.

Even the most frequent e-mail user would be hard-pressed to fill up gigabyte upon gigabyte of storage with their sent and received messages and attachments, but apparently free e-mail providers are still racing to fill that imaginary need. Less than a week after Google announced paid storage options for Gmail, Microsoft is upping the ante by more than doubling Hotmail’s free storage to 5GB.

The storage boost is just one part of a lengthy upgrade Hotmail – now called Windows Live Hotmail – will be undergoing. Microsoft announced the results of their developments on Monday in a blog entry. Besides the extra room, Hotmail will get more streamlined performance, longer retention time for spam and deleted items, support for Hebrew and Arabic, smaller headers, forwarding, vacation replies, and other goodies. One of the highlights is contact “de-duplication,” meaning if a friend has six different e-mail addresses and six different entries in your address book, you can now roll them into one to clean it up.

The new Hotmail moved from beta to a stable release in May, and the latest additions were based on the feedback from more advanced users. Changes will roll out gradually, over the course of several weeks.