According to Microsoft, one in five email messages is a status update from a social networking site. To help you deal with that, they are teaching you how to turn off email updates. No! Wait! They are revamping Hotmail.

Microsoft, looking to capitalize on the coming late-90s retro trend, is rejiggering hotmail for Generation Z, or whichever one is the one that is important right now. It actually looks kind of OK, in the video! Except that it will be hard to exchange email addresses with people, because they will be laughing so hard at you when you say "Hotmail."

It also has new features, like slideshows, and integration with Microsoft Office, which will probably work perfectly, with no hitches or irritating bugs or bizarre auto-formatting problems.

But according to the Times' Bits blog, the feature they're really touting is an auto-sort function that puts all of your email messages into four "buckets": "Mail from people you know," "mail from social networks," "personal business," and "spam." These are definitely not at all like Gmail's "labels," for the reason that HEY CHECK IT OUT YOU CAN SEARCH BING IN THE EMAIL WINDOW.

And the reason we have "buckets"? Because one in five emails is a status update. One in five! How is this even possible? Why do people want status updates emailed to them? Is there something that I am totally missing here? I have a hard enough time forcing myself to look at Twitter. Why do I want it in the last safe place on the internet?!

[NYT]