The latest version of Microsoft’s Hotmail is going to be released in the later phases of this summer. Those who’ve been using the beta version, have been highly impressed by the currently introduced features of Hotmail and without a shadow of doubt, Hotmail has left Gmail, far behind. Let’s see how and why…

Integration with Facebook and social networks

Looks like Hotmail is more than just a simple email inbox/outbox page, because now you can get knee deep into social networking, through your Hotmail environment. Let’s say, you log in to your Hotmail account and see different comments from users on your Facebook profile – you can simply snap back and post comments without having to log into the Facebook main page.

Better mail handling

For mail handling purposes, Hotmail has introduced a new set of features that will allow you to see your mails as per a pre-set criterion. It’d include tagged emails, mails with photos, emails with Office Documents and much more. And you can also apply appropriate filters of your choice, to all those emails.

Better mail threading

This time Hotmail learned a few things from Outbox 2010 and decided to setup emails on the thread formula. It’d be like one of those chat features except that all your emails that have been sent or received from any particular person, will be setup in form of a chat log.

Outlook integration

In addition, Microsoft Hotmail has been bundled with Outlook and this feature is for those users who like to see their Hotmail emails, within the Outlook environment. This feature will give you the best of both worlds…