Microsoft Hotmail Improved, Keyboard Shortcuts, Personalization

If you have a web based email account, chance is that you either use Yahoo Mail, Google Mail or Microsoft Hotmail for that account. There are hundreds of smaller email providers, but those are the big three. Microsoft recently announced new features and improvements for their Hotmail email service on the Inside Windows Live blog.

One of the biggest changes in this new version of Hotmail are additional mouse and keyboard shortcuts. A new menu has been created that appears when a user right-clicks on a message in the inbox. The menu offers a direct link to reply, reply all or forward the selected message. This is in addition to previously supported right-click actions such as delete, move or mark as junk.

Users who like to use keyboard shortcuts whenever possible have now access to a whole new set of shortcuts, taken directly from Microsoft's desktop messaging client Outlook, as well as the online email services Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Users of Outlook, and those who switched from Gmail or Yahoo Mail to Hotmail can now use keyboard shortcuts that they are already familiar with. Popular ones include:

Outlook

• To do this - Press this
• Delete a message - Delete
• Create a new message - Ctrl+N
• Send a message - Ctrl+Enter
• Open a message - Ctrl+Shift+O
• Print a message - Ctrl+Shift+P
• Reply to a message - Ctrl+R
• Reply all to a message - Ctrl+Shift+R
• Forward a message - Ctrl+Shift+F
• Save a draft message - Ctrl+S
• Flag a message for follow up - L
• Mark a message as junk - Ctrl+Shift+J
• Mark a message as read - Ctrl+Q
• Mark a message as unread - Ctrl+U
• Move to a folder - Ctrl+Shift+V
• Open the next message - Ctrl+.
• Open the previous message - Ctrl+,
• Close a message - Esc
• Search your email messages - /
• Check spelling - F7
• Select all - S then A
• Deselect all - S then N
• Go to the inbox - F then I
• Go to your Drafts folder - F then D
• Go to your Sent folder - F then S

Gmail, Yahoo Mail

• To do this - Press this for Gmail shortcut - Press this for Yahoo! shortcut
• Delete a message - # - Delete
• Create a new message - C - N
• Send a message - None - Alt+S
• Open a message - O - None
• Print a message - None - P
• Reply to a message - R - R
• Reply all to a message - A - A
• Forward a message - F - F
• Save a draft message - Ctrl+S - Ctrl+S
• Mark a message as junk - ! - None
• Mark a message as read - Shift+I - K
• Mark a message as unread - Shift+U - Shift+K
• Move to a folder - None - D
• Open the next message - J - Ctrl+.
• Open the previous message - K - Ctrl+,
• Close a message - U - Esc
• Search your email messages - / - S
• Select all - * then A
• Deselect all - * then N
• Go to the inbox - G then I - M
• Go to your Drafts folder - G then D
• Go to your Sent folder - G then T

All keyboard shortcuts work at the same time, which means that you can either press the delete key or # to delete a message, or Ctrl-n, c or n to create a new message.

You find all supported keyboard shortcuts here.

Hotmail users can now customize their email messages by setting a default font and personal signature for all email messages. Here is a video that demonstrates the new features.

What's your take on the new Hotmail features? I really like the new keyboard shortcuts as they tend to speed things up considerably.

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