If Hotmail was a person it could have kids now. But it would be a crime

To drag things back on-topic...

Around 1993, when I got my first PPP Internet account and learned how to use Eudora and procmail, one of the first domains that went into my straight-into-the-shitcan list was hotmail.com. Never in the nearly twenty years I've had email did I see anything either delivered from hotmail -- or spoofed with hotmail.com as the "from" address -- that wasn't spam. In fact, in the mid '90s, throwing hotmail.com, along with yahoo.com and aol.com into my procmail "shitcan list" pretty much eliminated 90% of the spam aimed at my inbox.

So, I suppose I do have hotmail to thank for consolidating all that spam in one place so I could shitcan it all in one stroke.

I had a hotmail account very briefly about ten years ago -- actually logged into it only once or twice -- as a backup address for email while on the road and, as the article mentions, to provide a sacrificial email address for those obnoxious-assed Web sites which insist that I "register".

Of course, it seems that gmail.com has taken over that role recently; I had gmail.com in my SpamAssassin "shitcan without mercy" list for quite a while, until I was forced to open several gmail accounts to start a couple of blogs I run and my YouTube channel.

I also use them as my sacrificial email addresses to throw at aforementioned obnoxious-assed Web sites, and for order confirmations when I shop online, and as emergency backup addresses in case my own domains' email servers go down (rarely). I log onto them once or twice a week, maybe, to catch any stray email I may actually want to read, and to scrape out all the spam.

this should be...

no question about it, after reading the first 4 or 5 paragraphs, this should be in the BOfH section :P

now i'll go back to reading [howard cosell] "the rest of the story" [/howard cosell] ;)