For some strange reasons, this week’s my Hotmail/ Live Mail account was literally bombarded with spam. At one point, I was getting like 8 pharmaceutical/ prescription drugs related spam. Mind you these are not lexicon engineered and image embedded emails but basic Rx spam v1.0. The spam filter in Hotmail/WLM is really quite poor. Nothing seems to be captured by the filter. I even went to explicitly check my settings to see if my filter was turned off.

One reason why many people are ditching their Hotmail account for Gmail is not just because of the generous mail space but increasingly, people are spammed out of their existing account or the current UI cannot cope with large amount of emails.

Personally, in view of the extremely huge membership numbers, I suggest the priority one for the WLM team is not so much expanding the use of AJAX or porting OWA to Hotmail. But getting the core basics right. There are serious pain points that still need to be address are:

a) getting the user interface right:

   i) presenting the right functionalities in different page views (improvements are slowly being made, but they take too long),

   ii) making it easy for people to provide feedback (the “What Do You Think?” button on the bottom left hand corner goes to ideas.live.com where there is no direct feedback mechanism) and

   iii) working out how to overhaul the current advertising format seamlessly into the email experience. Why are we still using a Web 1.0 advertising approach for a Web 2.0-ish product? The Web 2.0 UX does not seem to flow into the current product.

b) strengthen spam filter capability

c) resolve the bloated interface and loading experince

Colour scheme, right click functionality – cool but still the current beta version of WLM, doesn’t win me over Gmail. WLM Team, if you read this entry, KISS. Keep it simple and sweet.