One of the best messaging services that has ever been and it still is, without a doubt, is Hotmail. But even though it had had a pretty good acceptation from the users, it still has to win a war against every single messaging service it has ever been, such as Gmail, to be the top one messaging service that ever existed in this cybernetic world. That’s why we must not be surprise that instead of updating a little their service and system would go for a re-lunch.
This time Hotmail’s team is decided to get a better version of Hotmail, so everyone can use it from a cellphone or a tablet PC, giving us new tools to stop the spam and creating better filters that would automatically work instead of having us to configure them (saving us lot of time we could spend sending mails and going on with our lives). It also works faster and better, without counting that now is even more user-friendly, a thing we would have never expected to happen since nowadays is really easy to use for any kind of user, from youngster to older people. One of the things that Hotmail’s team added and want people to notice it is the possibility to interact with almost any social web it can be, specially Facebook, Google+, Badoo and many many others.
As you can see, social webs are the future of virtual interaction, so meeting people and interact with them is even easier nowadays, and Hotmail wants to be sure of not end up out of this new fashion, that’s the actual meaning of a re-lunch instead of a simple update, they want to show that they made a really big change to keep on with the fashion, and you can even use it anywhere thanks to it’s support with cellphones. Be sure to try it out as soon as you can, it can really simplify the way you send messages.
Hotmail’s re-launching
Unlocking a Hotmail account
Having your Hotmail account locked may be a pain in the ass, and unlocking it must be done if you’re someone who relies in that, even though you may have broken any rules at any point in the time if Hotmail’s team locked your Hotmail account. Unlocking it may be hard, but with a simple guide we may help you unlocking it.
First of all, the following instructions must be done using Internet Explorer, so even though you don’t like it, if you use another web browser it won’t work:
1. Log in to your Hotmail account using your account and password.
2. A nee page will load, indicating that our Hotmail account has been locked.
3. We’ll look in the bottom of the page, where it says “English”, click on it.
4. There will be many languages to choose, just choose “English” again and the click on “Save changes”.
5. A new page will load; here we can just click on “Continue”.
6. The initial page will load again, just click on “Continue”.
7. In the following page you’ll be able to select your country and write our cellphone’s number, and that’s what we’ll do, and when everything is done click on “Send code”. But at this time it can also came an alternative hotmail account, and if our current one is not being used and cannot be used anymore, just go to step 10.
8. If our country was in the list and you didn’t have any troubles, you’ll receive a new SMS to your cellphone. If not, go to step 10. At this point we must insert the code we received and click on “Continue”.
9. Now we just need to put both our old password and a new one and our hotmail account is going to be unlocked for us to use.
10. If you had problems with the SMS, don’t worry, you’ll just have to put some extra info for your account to be unlocked. Instead of selecting our country’s region for the SMS this time, we’ll click on Costumer Support.
11. Now we’ll need to put our hotmail account (the one with the problem), and another hotmail account to be kept on contact with the Support Team.
12. Now you’ll be asked for many types of information, just fill them as much as you remember, or as close too, this will help the Support Team to solve your problem.
If you ever had a Hotmail Plus or a Xbox Live account you’ll need to fill the credit card part (don’t worry, this is no kind of fraud, it’s just to verify that this account is truly yours). You’ll have your hotmail account unlocked in around 72 hrs.
This steps will help you unlock your Hotmail account, just follow them carefully and you’ll get to something.
Windows Live Movie Maker
Pictures and movies are the best thing we have to store our memories, those beloved moments we may never want to forget and want to cherish in our heart with all of our might. In the past, these kind of memories were easily touchable, and so breakable, easy to burn, break or rip apart. But nowadays everything is stored in a digital way, it’ll be harder to destroy our memories (of course, if we know how to back it up properly, just in case of a serious disaster).
Sharing our memories online is something very common nowadays too, but we may not want to share everything we live just like that, our privacy may be in the middle of that, so editing videos and pictures is something usual too. Today we got a really good software to recommend, specially for those who love to edit videos and share them with family and friends online, and it’s called Windows Live Movie Maker. This great program is part of the Windows Live Essential pack, and it’s an upgraded version of the old Windows Movie Maker. This one has big improvements since that time:
• Easier to look for videos and pictures, you won’t need to upload every single one to the program.
• More effects were added for movies, like new transitions, title effects, and credits effects.
• More ways of using soundtrack of a video.
• You can create movies with a few clicks using the AutoMovie tool.
• You can always see the preview of the resulting video.
• You can save your movie in your hard drive disk when you finish editing.
• You can also upload it directly to any social web or website you want, besides sending it by mail.
As you may see, the biggest improvement was made to be internet-compatible, so sharing your creations and memories are easier as the time pass.
Problems with attachments in hotmail?
Problems with attachments?
One of the biggest problem Windows Live Messenger used to have was amount of bytes you could send as an attachment in a mail, and even nowadays this can be a pain in the ass. Sending big files was almost impossible to accomplish, and even today, if you want to attach a file to a mail you’ll have big size-related problems, sometimes being unable to send a file by attachment to a mail and ending up uploading that file in a server, which requires even more time.
But if you’re having troubles sending big files by mail, we may have some tips to help you, since the problems about attachments to a mail are quality, not quantity. Here are some good tips to send big files through mail:
• The limit per file is 10 MB, so if you have a file that pass that limit by 3 or 4 MB, you can compress it using Winrar, you’ll end up with a compressed file that’ll fit a mail perfectly.
• If the file is way bigger than that, you can split it into multiple files, sending many in just one mail, or send them in different mails.
• If you’re having troubles sending a movie, splitting may be impossible and compress it will risk it’s quality, so making a .rar out of it and then splitting may be the best choice.
• You can also upload that movie to Skydrive, something that’ll save time and will be a lot easier than compressing and splitting the file.
As you can see, a problem that in the past was almost impossible to fix can now be fixed in a matter of seconds, and you won’t even have to worry that much of methods to send a file by mail.
i2Symbol: creating emoticons with symbols
One of the best thing we could do in Hotmail’s services is to be original, sending creative emails are definitively more attractive to the sight than a plain and boring mail with jus the subject. Thanks to all of Hotmail’s effort to help us here we have many kind of emoticons, and you can even download a lot of free packs of emoticons for free from MSN’s website (backuping theme is really important, you may want to kill yourself if you’re a emoticon’s fan and you lose over 12000 emoticons).
But sometimes we won’t be able to use emoticons on certain sites because they might end up showing instead of a certain word if it’s saved that way, like using the word “cat” to make a cat’s face show up (it’ll end up in showing an emoticon every time we write “cat”). But for those sites we have a really amazing feature that is totally online and free for you to use, and is called “i2Smbol”, a great website that will help you to make emoticons using symbols that you can easily find in your keyboard, and you can even use certain symbols used in other countries’ keyboards (like the Japanese ones).
Using this feature is really easy, just click on one of the emoticons made with symbols on the website (you’ll have to click an icon) and it’ll be shown on a space that is over those buttons. In that space you’ll be able to copy or paste anything you want and make your most-original emoticon made with symbols.
Also, if you don’t want to use it just on Hotmail, you can also directly send the message to Twitter, or have the HTML code to share it with any kind of website. You can be really creative with this free feature.
Hotmail on Android with Messenger WithYou
Nowadays we live in a world that won’t even move at all if we don’t have Internet or any method to communicate without having a face-to-face conversation. We all end up using our computer to send every single email or to chat with someone (you can even to VideoChatting with your computer, something that really resembles a face-to-face conversation), but for people who travel a lot may be a bit harder to have a conversation with someone on the opposite of the world without spending a lot of money in just one call.
But if you have Android and a good cellphone with a full keyboard, you’ll be able to replicate the same chat you use in your compute using Messenger WithYou. This new cellphone-exclusive application is totally free, and you’ll be able to recreate MSN software like if you have it installed in your cellphone, and it can also be used with other messaging services (like Yahoo!). And even though is a basic version of the original MSN software it has many things to make you feel like if you were using the real thing, like chatting with people, group chatting, files exchanging, etc.
Regarding the graphic interface, it resembles the MSN software a lot, specially because of the way it is designed, but you’ll be have to clearly see that it has been reduced to fit a cellphone’s screen (well, we have the basic functions, why make it heavier and bigger if it’s not going to be of any use? I’ll end up being just a nuisance to have to move the screen of a really big program, especially in a cellphone).
Stop receiving messages from certain contacts in hotmail
Life with Hotmail’s messaging system is not always good, there might be times you won’t want to receive certain messages, or if you have someone you really don’t like but he somehow got your hotmail address and keep sending you messages you don’t even want to delete because that means some extra work for you, we have one great feature for you in Hotmail.
With this amazing and one of the most useful feature that Hotmail has to offer we’ll be able to block a contact, and that way we can avoid his/her messages to reach our account and we won’t have to worry about that person anymore. Activate this feature that will block certain contacts so their messages won’t reach you, they’ll be eliminated instead. To activate it you first need to be logged-in to your hotmail account, so if you’re not logged-in just do it.
Then go to your inbox and look for the label that says “More options”, which appears once you’ve clicked on the “Options” label. A new page will load showing lots of titles and options, but now you’ll click on the option that says “Safe and blocked senders” under the “Preventing Junk Mail” title. A new page will load again, showing you three options, but the one we care about is the last one, the one called “Blocked Senders”. If you click on that link a new page will load again, showing you a space to fill with any kind of account you may want to block. Once you finish completing wit the account click on “Add to list >>” and that person will be blocked.
But if for any reason you want to let a person you’ve previously blocked to send you messages, you can always go back to the page used to mark the blocked senders and eliminate it from that list. You just need to select the contact on the list and click on “<< Remove from list”.
Redirecting emails from one account to another in hotmail
We all may remember the first email account we created, and if it hasn’t been hacked (there exist evil people who would steal and account from a random person) we may have changed it as the time passed. In old times it was harder to change from one account to another, since you have to send an email to all of your contacts telling them to change the hotmail account they had from you, so instead of sending emails to the old one they would send them to the new one.
But nowadays things are a lot easier, and you don’t really have to close your old account or tell everyone to send emails to your new account. That is because Hotmail has an amazing feature to redirect emails from one account to another. To activate this you need to be sign in to Hotmail account. Once you’re logged-in, look for the label that appears as “Options”, click on it, and then click on “More options”.
A new page will load, and there you’ll look for the option called “Reply-to address” under “Writing email” title. If you click on that a new page will load, and there you’ll be able to specify the account where all the messages are going to be send instead of that account. Once you’ve filled the “Other address” field, click on save and all the mails will be redirected to that account.
This can be used to avoid deleting some account, though is good to delete certain accounts so other people can use them (there is no point in having ten different accounts and redirect all of them to just one). And the good part about this feature is that you can also redirect the emails to other type of accounts, like Gmail’s, Yahoo’s or any other service you may have in mind.
How to stop Hotmail from saving your sent emails
Like cellphones, Hotmail’s messaging service also save the messages you’ve sent in a folder called “Sent”, something similar to a cellphone’s outbox. Regardless this feature being pretty useful if you want to have a record of all the messages you’ve sent, when you did it, and who you sent it, it can de de-activated with just some simple steps, as easier as it takes to delete the sent messages, though if you’re going to delete them anyway is just better to de-activate this option to avoid such useless task.
To do so you first have to log-in to your hotmail’s account and go to “More options” label that will appear as soon as you place your cursor over the “Options” label. When you click this a new page will load, showing us lot of titles and some hyperlinks under each one that will load us to different pages depending on what we wish to do. The title we’re looking for now is the one called “Writing email”, but more precisely, the option called “Saving sent messages”. Once you find that option click it for a new page to load. In that page you’ll just have two options, and you can select just one, to save them or not to save them. When you’ve selected the option, click the button that says “Save” and all the changes will be saved, changing you configuration.
Now no more messages are going to be saved into the “Sent” folder, instead they will just be deleted by Hotmail, preventing us from having to do the troublesome task of deleting them. Regardless this option, this write highly suggest you to keep your emails record if you’re using to email any kind of business partner, since if you don’t have them that person can betray you pretty easily.
From MSN to Hotmail
There can be a hundreds of reason for a person to change his/her hotmail account for another, like for example, the fact that said person chose a very funny name for hi/her account and must change it to use it with a business partner, or maybe it used a name for that hotmail that could be offensive to other people (when you choose a name for the hotmail account, try to be as neutral as possible).
Creating another hotmail account is not a big deal, but the real problem here can be getting all the contacts from the old account back! Of course, is not so bad if you just have 20 or 25 contacts, but it can be a really troublesome task if you have around 500, and you’re really close of all of them. But Hotmail has a great feature that is the one of exporting contacts, so you can import them to that same account (in case you want to do a restore of the contacts) or to another new hotmail account (something that would really solve the problem described above). Hotmail website itself offers us that option, but we can also do this from the Messenger program, just log in, go to the “contact” label and the click on “export contact list”. A new file will be created after that, the same we we’ll use to restore the contact list in case you lose them all. There you’ll have a very important file, and be sure not to lose it if you decided to close your hotmail account to then open a new open. When you have then new hotmail account ready, just log in again to the Messenger program, go to the same “contact” label, but this time select “import contact list”. This way the entire contact list inside that file will be on your new hotmail account and your Windows Live MSN contact list.
This is the best and faster method to restore your contact list, and maybe the only one, unless you’re ready to spend a whole afternoon copying-pasting your contact list again.