Microsoft this morning announced a ton of new and convincing features that will be added to the new Hotmail as part of Windows Live Wave 4 coming this summer. The new Hotmail can definitely make some competition for Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. It focuses on organizing the inbox and making it easier to do simple tasks. The first and most prominent feature is Sweeps. It lets you better organize certain emails from your inbox that come from other filters. You can quickly keep them in the filter, but not necessarily in your inbox so you have it for later viewing.

Courtesy: Microsoft

Other features include the ability to have all photos in an email appear as a slideshow within Hotmail. Plus, you can now upload up to 200 photos at 50MB each in a single email -- which is a LOT of photos. They all go to your Windows Live SkyDrive. On top of the photos, there's the ability to view videos from Hulu and YouTube right within the email using the new "Active views" feature. You can even track packages right from the email. In addition, there's more social integration to with your inbox and better access to Messenger from the sidebar.

In their official blog post, Microsoft adds this statement:

In this post we covered a few highlights of the new Hotmail and in follow-up posts we’ll go into more depth on other areas that we invested in, including enhanced account protection, full-session SSL, multiple email accounts, subfolders, contact management, and ever-growing storage.

View the brief video tour below.