The revamp, scheduled for lift off at 5pm last night, pulled itself together -in the past couple of hours," a spokesperson from Microsoft's Australian arm ninemsn told ZDNet.
Glitches discovered during yesterday's test rollout of the spruced up service brought the relaunch to a grinding halt, giving users just a brief glimpse of what was to come. ninemsn declined to disclose what the technical problems were.
"There were some issues with the global rollout of the upgrade, because of Hotmail's enormous scale, which meant users saw the new service for a short amount of time," ninemsn representative Samantha Herron said.
Microsoft is touting the upgrade as providing a more user-friendly interface and improvements to email filtering and spam monitoring.
The revamp allows Hotmail account holders to choose between high and low levels of spam filtering and provides an -exclusive" option which filters out emails from people other than those correspondents listed in the user's address book.
The upgrade also adds Swedish and Dutch language options and allows users to view their five most frequent correspondents when composing mail.
Microsoft claims to have 110 million worldwide Hotmail account holders -- 3.5 million of which are Australian.
I like the new look BUT printing is too small!!!