Microsoft ?Hotmail ?
Who cares?
I don't.
Like a girl with a purse full of penicillin - best avoided.
Microsoft has apologized, but not explained why nearly 20,000 Hotmail accounts were mysteriously emptied of their contents during the Christmas holiday. Corporate vice president for Windows Live Chris Jones blogged on Monday that 17,355 Windows Live Hotmail accounts had lost all their email messages during the course of what …
360 million users, and 17,000 of them have a problem. I make that less than 0.00005% of users were affected. (Sorry if I'm out by a decimal place)
Next, the problem occurred over a holiday period, and was fixed within four days.
All this from a service that costs nothing to the end user.
If your corporate e-mail system lost your account's e-mails over the holiday, would they have been recovered by this morning (When you get back to the office) ? Or what about that e-mail account you have with your ISP (Which you pay for) ?
As much as Microsoft/Google/cloud bashing is de rigueur, I think in this case, MS have been quite good.
Disclaimer: I use a paid for e-mail service, not a free Hotmail/GMail/whatever e-mail account.
Yeah, it's more like just under 0.005%, but what's a couple of orders of magnitude when you're talking pissed -off freeloaders, right?
I agree though; most in-house systems struggle to serve a fraction of the end-users with a fraction of the reliability that most cloud providers manage, even the comparatively pants ones like Hotmail.
Not sure I'm buying the explanation though. Sounds a bit "training exercise" if you know what I'm saying...
Paris 'cos she likes an extra couple of digits, according to our sources.
i give everyone a unique e-mail address to reply to. The over whelming quantity of the spam i receive use "To" address given solely to Hotmail users. Both Hotmail users who's unique "To" address comprise the largest proportion of the spam are sufficiently technical to operate an email account but not to understand it. It may be that the users of Hotmail remaining may be less aware of the problems at Hotmail and therefore more likely to have an unrecognised breached account.
On the other hand I retain a hotmail account for historic reasons the quantity of spam to that account has dropped over the last year.( almost certainly most random spamming eg Sending spam to "a random word @hotmail.com")
It's not clear from my tiny sample if hotmail is easier to breach or has a higher level of less adept users.
do other spam tracking readers have similar experiences?
Love how the Microsoft Apologists downvote your post - in an article clearly demonstrating how shit Microsofts products really are. Exactly how crap does MS and the junk it keeps puking out have to get before the apologists accept reality clam up?
All we need now is an Evil Jobs icon - oh wait, the first person to post already did that. How original.
"Microsoft has apologized, but not explained why nearly 20,000 Hotmail accounts were mysteriously emptied of their contents during the Christmas holiday."
I can tell you why - it's because MS are shit. Everything the do is shit. Their OS is shit (and full of security bugs), their browser is shit (and full of security bugs)... in fact, just about everything they've ever realsed has been shit (and full of security bugs). Sometimes I'm amazed that there isn't a security bug in Paint or Calculator or something - they seem good at putting bugs everywhere.
Deleting everyone's email though - marvellous. Just what you want from your email provider!
since i have a US tattooed account, i was a bit worried this affected me too, but it looks like everything is still there. i'm a long time hotmail user and never really had any issues with it.
would've been quite a shame had i lost it all, there's a handfull of old messages in there that hold sentimental value.
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