The deals services of today are essentially glorified email marketing. Groupon gets credit for turning the concept in to a huge mainstream trend, and deals are certainly accessible in other ways, but all in all, it’s still email marketing. As …

Google has just launched a campaign to attract more users to its already popular Gmail service. It asks current Gmail users to “save their friends from outdated email” by helping them jump on board the Gmail train. The way to …

You don’t much hear about Hotmail, or, well, email as a whole much anymore — unless, of course, there’s some kind of virus running rampant. That being said, even news on that particular front is pretty quiet. The fact is, …

Pingdom has put together an interesting report looking at just how important webmail is for the three companies that dominate it – Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Citing data from Alexa, the firm finds that Gmail makes up 23% of the …

Microsoft announced added support for its “Active View” functionality in Hotmail, for LinkedIn, Netflix, Posterous, and LivingSocial. In a nutshell, this means you can now interact with each of these services as if you were on their respective sites, without …

Microsoft announced that its Office Web Apps for Windows Live SkyDrive and Hotmail are now available n 18 new countries in Central and South America, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, …

Five months ago, Microsoft announced that Hotmail users in Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. could begin to chat with their Facebook friends while checking their email.  Now the integration of Hotmail and Facebook Chat is complete in every place where Facebook is available.

We’ll admit: this may not sound like a big deal insofar as it’s pretty simple to toggle between a Hotmail tab and a Facebook tab.  But the development at least goes to show that relations between Microsoft and Facebook are as good as ever.

Microsoft has launched a new feature for Hotmail, providing Hotmail users with aliases so they don’t have to give their primary email address to every site that asks for one, and still don’t have to go create a whole new account. 

At the end of December, some Hotmail users experienced problems with their email – it was gone. Messages and folders went completely missing from their accounts. Luckily, for those users, the emails came back. 

Microsoft says it recovered 100% of email and folders for the accounts affected. Unfortunately, for those who didn’t sign into their accounts between the time of the incident and the time the account was restored, any messages sent to their accounts during that time would have bounced. 

Microsoft has some interesting news out for Hotmail users. The company has partnered with some other companies to bring a new kind of email to the inbox – one that is as up to date as possible, and lets users interact with sites from within the email itself.

Microsoft announced that it is rolling out some new features to Hotmail. These include: the ability to track packages referenced in your email from Hotmail itself, chat with Facebook friends, sharing photos more easily with expanded coverage and new features, viewing more videos from inside Hotmail, and organizing and finding important email with subfolders.

Craiglist CEO Jim Buckmaster wrote a feisty blog post aimed at CNN’s Amber Lyon. It begins:

I see you’ve now gotten around to requesting an interview with me or a company spokesperson, 90 days after you ambushed our namesake and founder, Craig Newmark, following his May 20th talk on veteran’s affairs and other issues unrelated to craigslist, at a conference in Washington.

Microsoft has launched some new Bing Maps integration with Hotmail. When Hotmail users create a new email message, they can insert Bing Maps data.

When a user selects "Maps and Places", a task pane opens, which lets you add new locations or interact with previously defined locations. It will default to the address you have in your Windows live profile. If you add a new place, you can store it in a Bing Maps collection and pick it from a list later.

Microsoft announced that it has completed the roll out of its new Hotmail experience. All customers have now been upgraded.

MySpace has announced integration with Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail. The beta integration is rolling out to mutual users of the two services starting today.

"By integrating core features of both platforms, users will be able to discover what their friends are doing online through photos and the activity stream across social networks," says MySpace’s Manu Rekhi.

Microsoft has introduced a preview of its Hotmail email service aimed at reducing inbox clutter and winning over users of other rival services such as Yahoo mail and Gmail.

Key highlights of the revamped Windows Live Hotmail include the ability to create and edit Office documents right in the inbox, view new emails from friends, social network updates, shipments and appointments upon logging in.

If you ever set out to collect personal email addresses at a tech gathering, here’s a tip: generally speaking, you can save time by typing or writing out the "@gmail" part before approaching people.  But Compete provided a bit of a reality check today by showing that Hotmail remains in the top spot overall.

It’s often interesting to learn about a product or service’s users – particularly when you are one.  Maybe you’ll find that your stylish small car is popular with old ladies, for example.  Or that your taste in TV shows mirrors that of eight-year-old boys.  Anyway, Rapleaf recently took a look at this concept as it applies to email.

Microsoft and MySpace announced that Windows Live will now begin broadcasting MySpace user activity streams to the Windows Live Platform via MySpaceID. What this means is that users of Windows Live, Windows Live Messenger, and Hotmail, who are also MySpace users, will be able to see their friends’:

Gmail has reportedly become the third largest web-based email service in the United States. According to data from comScore, Gmail has surpassed AOL’s email service.

This data shows that in July Gmail had 37 million unique visitors, while AOL had 36.4 million. If this data is accurate, and Gmail continues to grow, that just leaves Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail left for it to tackle.

Microsoft announced today that Bing has been added to Windows Live Hotmail’s quick add feature, which itself was announced back in February. This means Hotmail users can easily search Bing for items to insert into email messages.

Users can each for maps, restaurants, movie times, images, videos and business listings from their inboxes. They can also preview and insert videos and images from the web.

Gmail will now let you import email and contacts from other email providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL (and a bunch more. Full list at the bottom of the article). This means that if you have an old account that you’d like to merge into your Gmail account, you can do so.

It also means (and this is what Google is pushing for) that users of other services can easily start new Gmail accounts without abandoning everything they have built up with another provider. Google is making the switch more enticing.