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Over the past few weeks there's been a number of interesting announcements from the likes of Yahoo and Hotmail/Live Mail you guys might want to take note of.

The "Unsubscribe" button in Windows Live Mail

The first of these was news from Microsoft that they'll be integrating an Unsubscribe button into their webmail interface. While it sounds like a minor update, it's actually a very significant step towards reducing false positives from the "Report Spam" button. If you've ever got a spam complaint from a Hotmail recipient, you know what I mean.

There are a few conditions that will need to be met to ensure the Unsubscribe button is visible, the most important of these being that you'll need to be in your subscriber's Safelist or Contacts. We plan on making some small tweaks to our mail headers in the coming weeks to support this new functionality, and we'll give you plenty more details on how to take advantage of this feature then.

We've been pretty harsh critics of Microsoft lately, but they are leading the industry with this change and we take our hats off to them.

Yahoo! may be turning off images by default

While images are now off by default for the new Yahoo Mail! (currently in beta), rumours are abound that Yahoo! may plan on turning images off by default for the classic version of Yahoo! Mail too. Yahoo! have already explained that they won't be forcefully upgrading current users to the new version when it's released, but it will be the default for any new customers.

What does this mean for you? Not a great deal, because designing for images being off was already one of the most important factors in email design. Having said that, we ocassionally see some customers sending predominantly image based emails. Let this be another wake up call for you. For a full run down of image blocking in popular email clients, check out this post.