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Several updates to Microsoft's Hotmail service should start rolling into user accounts; expanded storage, speed tweaks, and smarter contact handling rank among the improvements.

Hotmail Smartens Up Contact Management

Free and premium accounts on Hotmail had their storage increased to 5GB and 10GB, respectively. That's part of a series of changes Hotmail users will see on the web-based email service.

The Hotmail team said on their Mailcall blog the new changes should arrive over the next few weeks. Expanded storage is just one of several updates being made.

Smarter contact management will recognize when an arriving email from a sender with the same name but a different email address as an existing contact could be the same person. Hotmail users will have the option to add the new email address to the existing contact.

Performance concerns received some attention, with the Hotmail team working on improving the speed of service, the top demand of people using Hotmail. It's an aspect of the service that will continually demand the ministrations of Hotmail engineers.

Other changes and improvements announced include longer retention times for email in deleted and junk folders; spam blocking and reporting; Hebrew and Arabic language support; and message forwarding.