Comments on: Hotmail Rant

By: rafaelo

rafaelo — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 08:32:51 +0000

I copied your message and sent it to hotmail. I have experienced the same. After i was one of the hotmail first customers, and having tons of mails with tons of pictures, documents etc. they deleted all of that information without a warning. Let’s see how they’ll reply to my message. I guess in the same way…delete it.

By: blackStar

blackStar — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 03:26:09 +0000

Personally I have nothing to rant about. E-mail accounts are simply that. I have my important contacts stored on multiple devices and notebooks to avoid such predicaments. Contact lists and all those other ‘features’ on email accounts are just for convinience.

And in any case, if you clicked the “I Agree” button when you created the hotmail account then I dont see why you should blame Microsoft for implementing their policies. I’m not saying St.Peter should let them through the pearly gates but they’re not Damien either.

By: Shiroh

Shiroh — Tue, 23 May 2006 08:46:21 +0000

Hotmail sucks. One day they simply deleted all my mails. Thankfully it is not my primary address.

Only it is much faster

By: HASH

HASH — Fri, 19 May 2006 19:58:26 +0000

Here’s my Hotmail Update on my letter to the Hotmail staff:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

staff@hotmail.com

Thank goodness. I was afraid I was wrong and that Microsoft actually cared about its customers.

By: M

Thu, 04 May 2006 07:16:20 +0000

That is precisely the kind of crass stupidity that makes a mockery of all of Microsoft’s attempts to clear its name.

Hotmail has nuked all my emails so many times i’m not even sure why i keep the account anymore, and sentimentality is fast losing currency.

When the yahoo beta goes live gmail will be surprised at how quickly many people will decamp. They’ve done a better gmail than gmail!!!

@David — promising 2 GB for each user does not mean that you actually have to allocate 2 GB whenever somone registers. You can start with allocating 100 or even 20 MB and up that whenever someone hits 50% of the current allocation

Also, I don’t buy the outlook argument. What use is it for you if you are on the road sans your laptop?

By: Ntwiga

Ntwiga — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 05:31:13 +0000

David

Nice post in defence of Microsoft Outlook but you missed a major minus for this fat client – all the other product are free, Outlook is not.

Also, sometimes, in fact, most of the time, all people want to do at their email service is . . . read email.

Would you believe that many people do not use an electronic scheduler/journal and do not care much for their contact lists as long as they can get their contacts when they need them and there is some kind of predictive pull up when they are entering them ( which all the email services do now with AJAX I think where they pull up matching contacts as you type ).

Sometimes, I think that too much functionality may be the problem.

Steve

By: HASH

HASH — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 06:49:09 +0000

Sounds like a mixture of pros & cons David. It’s like they either do something very well, or totally suck at it.

I had thought about your point #2 above, and I just can’t believe that with the cost of hard drive space now that Microsoft can’t afford to up give more space away. I understand that they have millions of customers, but they also have billions of dollars. If they want to be competitive, they have to up the ante.

By: David Seruyange

David Seruyange — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 14:54:29 +0000

In defense of Hotmail, but first with some disclaimers…

1. I have accounts many places, and although I don’t think it’s “open to the public” the new Yahoo! Mail which is, hands down, the best web based email tool out there. Gmail is great but not as good.

2. A lot of flexibility afforded other web based email sites is not available for Micro$oft because of the sheer number of users they already have on hotmail. Stuff like 2GB storage etc…

3. As a web based service, hotmail is nowhere near as good. Here’s something that pissed me off recently. Every once in a while I decide to forgive Hotmail and clean stuff up since I’ve had my account for so long. So this one time I was trying to organize things and found out there is a limit to the number of email filters you can use. Now that is crap.

The big but here is that Hotmail has an excellent fat client in Microsoft Outlook. Downloading mail, synchronization, offline storage – it’s very, very good. Ironic to see this conversation since yesterday I was doing clean up and was able to get through deleting more than 3,000 emails in less than an hour.

I’ve always wondered why Google and Yahoo! farm out their fat client support to products like Thunderbird, Outlook Express and other POP clients. Why not write a slick tool like Outlook which has support for contacts, journals, scheduling, etc… and have it synch with your web based mail service?

I’m sure there are hard problems to solve, mainly along the lines of security. But I don’t think that synchronization would be *that* hard.

Well, that’s my $0.02.

By: JKE

JKE — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 20:56:58 +0000

You know how hard it is to convince anyone of how bad Hotmail actually is? I’ll need to show this to my Mbuzi who’s using Hotmail and only opened up a 2nd account on Gmail when I begged her to do so. Arghh….I’ll need to show this post to her.

30 days? Ohh…let me check my kiku..address on hotmail DE.

By: Kierke

Kierke — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 16:13:27 +0000

I understand that ten years ago there was no other options and it really sucks that they did this. But why expect them to change. I am becoming more and more satisfied that the more people microsoft trashes then the less likely they will be around in ten years. Go Mac! Go Google! Go Open Source! And take notes on what not to do if you ever reach the top of the food chain.