After many months of rumor and speculation there appears to have been a drop in the ocean, and with it the start of Windows Live Wave 4. Windows Live Hotmail has received some changes that are being rolled out throughout September it what appears to be the start of a new series of Windows Live milestone updates.

So what about Messenger? Well Windows Live Messenger 10 is not specifically targeted here, but as Hotmail and Microsoft's IM client are closely related one can expect some light to breakthrough soon. For now however, we can only continue to speculate. Below is a list of the changes in Milestone 1 of Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 (thanks to LiveSide and our own mynetx).

• Auto Refresh of Inbox: Inbox is refreshed when a user is logged into WebIM, instead of after 60 seconds.
• Auto save Drafts: emails automatically saved to drafts as they are composed. Current auto save is set to 3 minutes.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: “Lots of keyboard shortcuts, including shortcuts to match both Yahoo and Gmail.” Here’s a list of the keyboard shortcuts.
• Contact Picker Improvements:
  
  1. edit contacts in compose
  2. recent email data used in auto-complete and contact picker
  3. copy/paste enabled in IE
  4. a “verify recipients” feature added
• Download all attachments: multiple attachments to an email downloaded together as a .zip file.
• WebIM Contact List: “view online contacts” added.
• Mobile browser improvements: backend changes to improve mobile performance.
• Action Bar at bottom of page: Reply/Forward/Delete is now available from both the top and bottom of an email.