Yeap, no longer Beta. yeap, they’ve joined the race. It was announced on Sunday by Microsoft that the popular MSN Hotmail free web based email service is now fully upgraded. They were the first web mail service that I’ve signed up for, but I haven’t been using it since Yahoo and Gmail. =P Although I use MSN Messenger a lot, I don’t check mails with Hotmail. Anyway, they’ve sported several new features and security enhancements.

1. Storage capacity increased from 1GB to 2GB of storage.
2. Ability to customize own design and layout.
3. Check out suspicious looking e-mails
4. It gives me the feel of a web based Outlook
5. A reading pane for previewing messages
6. Ability to drag-and-drop objects everywhere
7. Online integration with MSN Messenger

Well, they are actually lucky to still have a user base of more than 280 million active accounts, which is about 2% of the market share. However, Yahoo Mail is still the most used online web mail service. Most of the features like drag and drop and a 2GB storage capacity have already been implemented by Yahoo! Currently, Live Hotmail users will have an option to remain using the old version. I guess that users with lower bandwidth capacity won’t do so well with Live Hotmail’s rich graphic interface. Somehow or rather, all users will be moved over to Live Hotmail. Maybe that’s the time when everyone’s using broadband.

Microsoft Delivers Hotmail Upgrade
Hotmail’s migration process begins

That is according to ScanSafe’s Global Threat Report on February 2007. Unproductive simply means that the sites visited are not in line with the work of the company. Unproductive sites include :

• online chat
• gambling
• music
• porn
• dating & relationships
• webmail

During sporting events like the Super Bowl and World Cup, gambling and sporting sites will top the list. ScanSafe saw a traffic increase of 77% in US based request to gambling and sporting sites during the week before Super Bowl.

The highly unnecessary internet usage risks the company to exposure of :

• legal liability
• disclosure of confidential information
• breaches of compliance requirements
• unnecessary bandwidth consumption

Did you know that MSN is the most threatened IM in the world? and it has been the No.1 since February 2006. A total of 54% of unique threats were blocked for MSN while 21% went to Yahoo.

ScanSafe
Web security as a service

Trace Any IP Address In The World
See a satellite image of the place in the world it comes from