Hotmail Gets Interactive, Runs JavaScript Within E-mails

Windows Live has just announced something new for Hotmail: Interactive e-mail.

The e-mail giant is allowing developers to embed and run JavaScript from within e-mails; this is the natural next step in e-mail’s evolution from plain text to HTML and beyond.

What this means for the average e-mail recipient is that more of the messages they receive will be increasingly up-to-date, and content will be interactive. If the developer sending the e-mail is hip to Hotmail’s changes, you’ll be able to take actions from within the e-mail itself without having to navigate to a slew of other web pages. Basically, the new Hotmail e-mails will look, feel and behave like a web page running within an e-mail.

It’s a cool update, and it also has the potential to keep Hotmail more competitive with Google’s Gmail, which offers users previews of content from Flickr and YouTube within e-mails.

The problem with running JavaScript in e-mails, of course, is security: How can Hotmail protect users from malicious code? Windows Live Active Views is a product aimed at answering this question.

While we’d love to know more about what exactly Active Views is and how it does what it does, all Microsoft has told us so far is that Active Views uses “technology that allows senders to run code securely in their email messages.” That’s a pretty vague statement about a pretty cool feature; we’ll let you know when we learn more.

Orbitz and Monster.com will be the first two companies to use the new interactive e-mail platform from Hotmail, with LinkedIn and Netflix jumping on the bandwagon soon. Here’s a quick demo of the product: