In case you didn’t know here’s a summary of some of the new features coming to Hotmail:

- Smart Newsletter Filtering which allows users to highlight and delete newsletters with a single click or unsubscribe completely.

- Categories and advanced folder management that allow users to choose to categorize their messages in the inbox as opposed to having to file them in separate folders.

- Scheduled Cleanup allows you to automatically get rid of emails of a certain age, sweeping away old newsletters and out-of-date offers. You can also now keep only the latest message from a sender.

- Flags done right that position your priority messages right at the top of your inbox. No more having to mark messages as unread or email them back to yourself to keep them top of mind.

- Instant Actions are buttons that appear when your mouse hovers over a message allowing you to delete, flag, sweep, etc. messages with one click. Users can also customize their UI by adding and removing buttons based on the tasks they use most.

You can see and read more about the new feature for Hotmail at WinRumors and Liveside.

Either leave me a comment or send me a tweet with your question and I’ll attempt to make sure it gets answered next week.

I think it odd that photos doesn’t have the icon used by Photo Gallery or photos.live.com, but these new icons and text quickly highlight some of the best features of Hotmail.

I wondered if other Windows Live services has received new icons and text too. Turns out they haven’t. Services which are part of Hotmail such as Calendar and People all have the same icons and text but nearly all other services still use the smaller icons. However, and I noticed this last week, Windows Live Account has different icons but looks like it needs to be updated with the new SkyDrive logo.

Following these finding the Hotmail team are encouraging the great British public to put their thinking hats on to invent a timesaving device. The winner will be selected by “a team of esteemed judges” and will be given £10,000 to spend on themselves. In addition to this the Hotmail team will also get a team of people to develop a prototype of the invention.

If you want to enter this competition (and with £10000 up for grabs who isn’t interested?) then you can head over to the website at www.hotmailtimesaver.co.uk. Or if you happen to live or work near London’ Canary Wharf on October 5th or 6th , Birmingham’s Bullring October 14th or 15th or Manchester’s Spinningfields on October 21st or 22nd then you can pop into the the giant Hotmail inflatable dome (as seen below).

Hotmail is the UK’s largest webmail service and over the summer has received many new features including Office integration, the ability to view videos within emails, share 10GBs of photos in one email and even chat to your Messenger friends when browsing your emails. In the coming weeks it will also be possible to chat with your Facebook friends as well as your Messenger ones and even use some of the new features in Internet Explorer 9 (some people are reporting this functionality is already live but I don’t have it yet).

Update: I have been sent some pictures from inside and outside the dome.