My God
I just want to send an E-Mail saying hi
Microsoft has realized there's more to maintaining its lead over Gmail than shoveling buckets of storage at Hotmail users. Today, the company unveiled changes to its Hotmail web email service, wiring the service to its Bing search engine, its Silverlight media player, and its SkyDrive online store service. Due mid summer, the …
Is there nothing that can be left alone? I've been using Hotmail since it was originally launched, and was annoyed enough when MS ate it - but even then enough people knew my hotmail address that I kept it; it's my primary non-work contact.
But I want to send mail. That's it. Just mail. Simple ordinary ASCII (UTF-8 in a pinch) HTML-free mail, with, if required, an attachment.
Oh well, as long as the IMAP and the POP interfaces keep working, I can continue with Evolution and just use it as a post box.
Hey, why don't MS try to lock in users to proprietry document formats as well as the long suffering business sector? Ah, yes - that's what this appears to be. Wonder when we'll start seeing anti-trust / anti-competetive actions against MS when it comes to "free hotmail this, free hotmail that" all over a new system?
Largely a return to the ghastly MSN mess which attempted to replace a browser and all other junk into one end-user "friendly" application.
...enough said. These are all the classics signs of MS "all integrated" approach that later on pay off greatly for spammers and all other kinds of bad guts.
I'm thinking of starting a betting site on how long the first vulnerabilities will appear.
I use it pretty extensively as I'm a training instructor who travels around a lot, and I store copies of my course notes up there so I can access them in the event of laptop failure, memory stick loss etc. If they're making it so content over 30 days old is deleted (why am I thinking of "Logan's Run"?) I'll have to find something else to use instead.
"Microsoft will delete content older than 30 days" that's a hell of a drawback!! If I receive a document or photo via email, I expect it to stay there for as long as I keep the email.
I used to have a hotmail account. Well, I might still have it - they seem loath to actually let us delete the account - but I got mighty peeved when they deleted all my stored mail because I'd not logged in on the web interface, only via pop, for some time! That was the point I moved totally to my Google Apps hosted mail.
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It did drop the Hotmail name altogether and become Live Mail ... for all of 5 minutes, before they realised the brand was too strong to just chuck away (and perhaps acknowledging that it caused a degree of confusion between this and the desktop app, as nicely alluded to by your post).
@James re Gmail: Except in the UK where it's been Googlemail for the last few years, no? Still, at least that's sorted now.
In future, when i send an email with an attachment, i wont be sending an attachment at all, it will be uploaded to a server for my recipient to download through their mail. Then it will be deleted after 30 days. Same goes for receiving emails.
Well excuse me but i like to hold on to a lot of my attachments, i dont have a 30 day limit where i stop using something.
So my hotmail account will soon be deleted if this comes in; my gmail account has been deleted since Buzz; i wouldnt touch Yahoomail with a 10 foot pole; so can anyone recommend an online email service which i can just use as a bloody email service without having to worry about a) my personal data being hocked to the highest bidder, b) being spammed constantly by the service im supposed to be using or c) the service deleting my emails and attachments without my knowledge? Anyone?
Too true; so do junk, vulnerabilities, layout and ease of use. Since Hotmail fails on every count, I don't know why they're wasting so much wonga on a huge (and far too smug) billboard ad campaign obscuring the far more entertaining graffiti at the capitals railway stations.
I mean that a lot of storage space and a lot of users...
Recipe to lose money?
Unless they are a LOT more efficient than Google... Heh!
And make more from the adds than Google... Heh!
OK so I wonder just how much they are losing per year on this thing?
Anybody?
About the only thing I need from Hotmail that they seem to have NO plans to do, is to provide proper IMAP support. I know that their own Mail application sort of does IMAP and Outlook Connector SORT of does IMAP, but neither is perfect.
Bog standard IMAP support would be a darn site more useful that the updates I just read about.
Unusual quality journalism from the register. Who will stay with hotmail if they only allow 30 days for documents and then gets deleted, what's the point of 25G then? or do people consume 25G in 30 days? I doubt that.
I use hotmail but I must say I do prefer the old days of non Ajax cr*p, always seems to have something wrong with it. I swap my yahoo to old style too. Although I mostly access my hotmail and yahoo from my mobile so doesn't make much difference, so yes great service and hotmail is so bloody fast with syncing. I love hotmail and yahoo for their email service.