Set the junk e-mail filtering level

You can use the junk e-mail filter to help decrease the amount of junk e-mail that appears in your Inbox.
1.     Sign in to the Windows Live Hotmail website with your Windows Live ID (The user name and password that you use to sign in to any Windows Live, MSN, or Office Live sites and services. If you have a Passport Network, Hotmail, or Messenger account, you can use it as your Windows Live ID.) .
2.     In the upper-right corner of the page, click Options, and then click More options.
3.     Under Junk e-mail, click Filters and reporting.
4.     Under Filters and reporting, select the options that you want, and then click Save.
Notes
·         If you choose Exclusive for your junk e-mail filter, only messages from e-mail addresses on your Contacts or Allowed senders lists appear in your Inbox. Messages from senders not on those lists are automatically sent to the Junk e-mail folder.
·         You should occasionally check your junk e-mail folder to make sure that good messages are not sent to there by mistake.
 
 
Organize your contacts
 
You can use the contact list to store personal information about people you know, such as their names, addresses, and e-mail addresses. You can also sort your contact list to make your contacts easier to find. For example, you can sort your contacts alphabetically by first name or last name.

Add a contact 
1.     Sign in to the Windows Live Hotmail website with your Windows Live ID (The user name and password that you use to sign in to any Windows Live, MSN, or Office Live sites and services. If you have a Passport Network, Hotmail, or Messenger account, you can use it as your Windows Live ID.) .
2.     In the left pane, click Contacts.
3.     Click New.
4.     Type the details of your new contact, and then click Save.
 
Remove a contact 
1.     Sign in to the Windows Live Hotmail website with your Windows Live ID (The user name and password that you use to sign in to any Windows Live, MSN, or Office Live sites and services. If you have a Passport Network, Hotmail, or Messenger account, you can use it as your Windows Live ID.) .
2.     In the left pane, click Contacts.
3.     Select a contact, and then click Delete.
4.     Click OK.
 
Edit a contact 
1.     Sign in to the Windows Live Hotmail website with your Windows Live ID (The user name and password that you use to sign in to any Windows Live, MSN, or Office Live sites and services. If you have a Passport Network, Hotmail, or Messenger account, you can use it as your Windows Live ID.) .
2.     In the left pane, click Contacts.
3.     Select a contact, and then click Edit.
4.     Change the details of your contact, and then click Save.
 
Print your contacts 
1.     Sign in to the Windows Live Hotmail website with your Windows Live ID (The user name and password that you use to sign in to any Windows Live, MSN, or Office Live sites and services. If you have a Passport Network, Hotmail, or Messenger account, you can use it as your Windows Live ID.) .
2.     In the left pane, click Contacts.
3.     Click . A printable contacts page opens.
4.     Click Print. Depending on the size of your address book, downloading and printing it may take some time.

Merge duplicate contacts 
1.     Sign in to the Windows Live Hotmail website with your Windows Live ID (The user name and password that you use to sign in to any Windows Live, MSN, or Office Live sites and services. If you have a Passport Network, Hotmail, or Messenger account, you can use it as your Windows Live ID.) .
2.     In the left pane, click Contacts.
3.     Click the contact that you want to merge.
–or–
Hold down the CTRL key, and then click each contact that you want to merge.
4.     On the toolbar, click Merge.
5.     On the Merge Contacts page, you can click any of the menus to view or change the merged contact's information. Information that's overwritten when the contacts are merged is added to the merged contact's Notes box.
6.     To save the merged contact information, click Save.

Sort your contact list 
1.     Sign in to the Windows Live Hotmail website with your Windows Live ID (The user name and password that you use to sign in to any Windows Live, MSN, or Office Live sites and services. If you have a Passport Network, Hotmail, or Messenger account, you can use it as your Windows Live ID.) .
2.     In the left pane, click Contacts.
3.     In the upper-right corner of the page, click Options.
4.     Under Sort contacts, click the sorting option that you want.

Notes
·         To send e-mail to a contact, type their name in the To box when writing an e-mail message, or select the contact in the contact list, and then click E-mail contact.
·         To add a person to your contact list when you receive an e-mail from them, click Add contact in the message header.
 

Thanks
Brandon

1. Click on the Safari Menu and then choose “Empty Cache”
2. A dialog box will appear, click on “Empty”
3. Once completed, Click on the Safari Menu again and click “Preferences”
4. From the Security Dialog box click on the “Bookmarks” button
5. Then click on the “Show Cookies” button
6. Click on “Remove All”
7. Click on Done 

Thanks, Michael.

If you are a Hotmail Plus customer who is participating in the Windows Live Hotmail beta, you may have noticed that your Message Inbox storage meter capacity has increased from 2 Gb to 4 Gb. That's the great news. 

The not-so-great news is that while the storage meter on your Today page may have been upgraded, not all account inboxes have automatically been increased on the back-end yet. This seems like putting the cart before the horse…and the reason for this is that the storage upgrade is being gradually rolled across the universe and does not immediately change every account at the same time - you might have one account where you can store 4 Gb, but another account which hasn't been upgraded yet.

So, if you are a Hotmail Plus customer who has opted in to the Windows Live Hotmail beta and you try to store more than 2 Gb of data in your account, you may run into a storage error for short term. We have already begun rolling out the upgrade and hope to have it completed in the next two weeks or so.

If you're a Hotmail Plus customer who has not yet opted into the Windows Live Hotmail beta - either because we don't offer it in your market yet, or because of your own preference - your storage will not change.

If you are an MSN Hotmail or Windows Live Hotmail free customer, your storage will not be affected by this change either.

If you have general comments or questions, feel free to post them here. And, as always, if you have a technical support issue which is preventing you from using Hotmail successfully, please submit a ticket by going to http://support.live.com (for Windows Live Hotmail beta customers) or http://support.msn.com (for MSN Hotmail customers).

Thanks as always for your patience, your passion and your great feedback.

FiddlerCap is a tool we use to capture explicit communications between your computer and our servers - the requests your computer makes and the response our server provides. When you run into an error using Hotmail or Windows Live Hotmail, the most valuable information we can use to resolve the issue is captured in FiddlerCap. (Windows Live Mail has its own error logging tool).

This tool will allow us to view the unencrypted data that is sent between your computer and web servers while the tool is capturing information. This means FiddlerCap can’t record your password for Live Hotmail, but we would be able to see what emails are in your inbox if you viewed it with the tool running. The information gathered using the tool is only used for troubleshooting of an issue you report to us, and we do not use it for data mining or other activities.

1.       To install FiddlerCap, click here and save the file to your desktop

2.     Once the installer has finished downloading, double click on “FiddlerCapSetup.exe” on your desktop

3.     Read the License Agreement and then click “I Agree”

4.     Click “Install”

5.     Once installed, click “Close”

6.     FiddlerCap will now open automatically.

7.     Click “1. Start Capture”

8.     A new browser window will open – use this window to navigate to www.hotmail.com and reproduce the issue you are having (for instance, re-opening a message which generated an error).

9.     Once completed, go back to the FiddlerCap window and select “2. Stop Capture”

10.  Click on “3. Save Capture”, which will open the save file menu.

11.  Click the “Save” button to save the capture file to your desktop.

12.  If you have an open ticket with Mail Customer Support, reply to the message you received from Mail Customer Support and attach the FiddlerCap SAZ file to your reply.

You can uninstall FiddlerCap by going to Control Panel and selecting Add/Remove Programs.

If you are using a MAC, you can provide us a network trace by following these instructions:

To perform the trace you'll need to open a terminal window and then run a command. To do that just follow the below steps:

1. Go to Applications
2. Open Terminal.app
3. Type in the following command "sudo tcpdump -s 0 -A -i en0 –w ~/Desktop/trace.dmp" (Make sure not to include the quotation marks)

4. You may be requested to enter your administrator password at this point

Once you've done that, open up Safari and try login to Hotmail. Once you've finished reproducing the issue you're having, we'll need to stop the trace using the following steps:

1.       Click back on the Terminal Window

2.       Press Control-C

3.       Send the trace.dmp file