The Hotmail team has been quiet for a while since their v1 launch, however they've just launched a small but feature-packed update. As well as offering free accounts the new storage size of 5GB, paying customers (Hotmail Plus or MSN Premium) now get 10GB.

Ellie over on the Hotmail team has blogged the full list of changes, here's a few we're glad to see released:

• Improved contact management lets you merge duplicate contacts. This is a personal favourite, so nice work by the Contacts team.
• Auto-away messages, useful for when you go on holiday
• Account forwarding, so now you can forward your Hotmail account to Gmail or Yahoo. Why you'd want to do that I don't know

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