Microsoft just gave a sneak peek to the new Window Live Hotmail, representing the next generation in personal email. Practical innovations has been introduced to help people manage the clutter and regain control of their inboxes efficiently and the new features will become available to customers world-wide from  mid-2010.

A quick overview of the key updates:

Stay better organized

Todays inboxes are overflowing with mail that most people consider junk, even though it’s mail that’s legitimate.  To help keep inboxes clean and organized, the new Hotmail delivers the first and only virtual broom, enabling customers to easily sweep unwanted mail out of their inbox.  It also helps cut through clutter with intelligent filters that in a single click will filter the entire inbox to show mail just from contacts, just social network alerts, or just mail from the groups users belong to.

Manage your social networks from your inbox

With the new Hotmail, customers will be able to see rich previews of photos and videos from popular sites like Flickr, YouTube, Hulu and SmugMug, and see the status of tracked packages in real time, inside their emails. They’ll also be able to accept invitations to connect with someone on a social or professional networking site like LinkedIn – all from the convenience of their inboxes.

Increased attachment size

One of the biggest changes to Hotmail is the increased ability to manage and share personal photos and documents. Today, people are sharing over 1.5 billion photos and  350 million Microsoft Office documents per month in Hotmail.  Still, the attachment size problem remains, regardless of which mail service people use. The new Hotmail lets’ customers send up 10 GB of attachments (200 attachments each up to 50 MB in size) in a single message, erasing worries of attachment size limits.

You can find out more at http://hotmailpreview.com