Windows Live Hotmail has reached M10 stage in its beta development and this may prove to be the service's final testing phase. There have been various indications that Windows Live Hotmail Milestone 10 will be the final beta build, including emails sent by Microsoft to testers. The Redmond Company performed a vague countdown to the final release Windows Live Hotmail narrowing it down to just a few days.

"Just over few days before it's available to everyone! The official launch of Windows Live Hotmail will take place in a few days! Therefore very little time remains for you to test before everyone has the new version... The launch is nearly here," French users were informed by the monthly Hotmail email newsletter for April.

But one aspect of M10, that was somewhat overlooked is the POP aggregation capability. With this milestone Microsoft re-introduced the POP aggregation feature into Windows Live Hotmail. "This feature is not about accessing your Hotmail messages using POP3 protocol but using your other POP3 enabled email accounts from within the Hotmail's rich and famous web interface. Once configured, your external mails can be "aggregated" or pulled into your Hotmail mailbox," explained Ashu Tewari, Software Development Engineer with the Windows Live Hotmail team.

Users are permitted to add up to four Post Office Protocol 3(POP3) external email accounts. Hotmail will simply aggregate all messages from external accounts and enable users to access them via their inbox. Users have even the possibility of custom filtering their incoming external emails to specific folders.

However, at this point in time, the POP3 aggregation capabilities are restricted to paid accounts. Tewari hinted that Microsoft is looking to change this aspect. "At this point, it's available only to paid users (plus some partner users, university program users). We'd love to offer it to free users in the future, so we're looking into that and may do so at some time in the future," he said.