1 billion of which is spam

Dec 23, 2009 11:54 GMT  ·  By

No less than 4 billion emails are handled by Windows Live Hotmail every day, revealed Arthur de Haan, director, Windows Live Test and System Engineering. Out of the total number of messages that make through the Redmond company’s email service, only 3 billion are genuine. In this regard, Microsoft also filters in excess of 1 billion spam emails per day, namely messages that never make it into the users’ inboxes. “You can imagine that the Hotmail user interface you see in the browser is only the tip of the iceberg – a lot of innovations happen beneath the surface,” de Haan stated.

In order for customers to get a clear idea of just how gigantic Windows live Hotmail is, de Hann shared a few data about the service. Microsoft is offering Hotmail in no less than 59 regional markets, and in 36 localized versions/languages. The service hosts more than 1.3 billion inboxes which belong to over 350 million people. In fact, Windows Live Hotmail has 350 million active users on a monthly basis, with many of the customers having multi accounts.

“We are growing storage at over 2 petabytes a month (a petabyte is ~1 million gigabytes or ~1000 terabytes),” de Haan added. “We currently have over 155 petabytes of storage deployed (70% of storage is taken up with attachments, typically photos). We’re the largest SQL Server 2008 deployment in the world (we monitor and manage many thousands of SQL servers).”

Microsoft is currently laboring on the next version of Windows Live Hotmail. Although it’s not ready to share details about the evolution of Windows Live Wave 4 clients, the software giant has already introduced new features in Hotmail. With Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 Milestone 1 (M1) users will be able to download multiple attachments as a ZIP archive, enjoy extra keyboard shortcuts, a new buddy list for Messenger, as well as enhancements to contacts for messages, and auto-save for email drafts.

“Hosting your mail and data (and our own data!) on our servers is a big responsibility and we take quality, performance, and reliability very seriously. We make significant investments in engineering and infrastructure to help keep Hotmail up and running 24 hours a day, day in and day out, year after year. You will rarely hear about these efforts – you will only read about them on the rare occasion that something goes wrong and our service has run into an issue,”