Just to provide a pit of perspective to the anti-Gozu crowd. How would you all feel if Microsoft bought up THIS website, and promptly turned it into a steaming pile of shit?
Yes, we’re free too, but I know that I’d be right mad if anybody took this site and screwed it all up. He had a good thing going with Hotmail when it first came out, now it sucks cat ass thanks to Microsoft.
And, now that I’m thinking about it… just because a service (or product) is free doesn’t give the provider the right to let it be crappy. I worked for Radio Shack about 10 years ago, and they had a “promotion” where they would give away a flashlight with a coupon. The flashlights were absolute garbage, I’d bet that over 30% didn’t work at all fresh out of the box, who knows if the “good” ones would have lasted either. I was embarrassed to give these things away, people would rely on it during a blackout, or some such thing, and get screwed.
Point is, just because you, as a company, CHOOSE to make something free doesn’t mean that customers won’t rely on it. People use Hotmail as their main email address, and the service is lacking. Lacking in ways that other free email services don’t, that is unacceptable.
I use both Yahoo and Hotmail. Both seems to filter SPAM pretty decently for me. I use Yahoo for business/job-searching stuff, and MSN for bill-paying and ordering.
One thing that I really like about Yahoo is that there’s a free synch program that will synch up your contacts, calender, and even notes with MS Outlook. I have all my contacts available to me everywhere with net access.
Gozu’s malfunction is actually a pretty simple thing, and is closely tied to basic human nature.
Once upon a time, Gozu found something neat. It was free. He thought it was a great thing, and began using it in earnest. Who could blame him for that?
Then, one day, someone else began to screw up this neat thing that Gozu had.
As time went on, they began to screw it up worse and worse and worse and worse, until it was a loathsome joke, compared to what Gozu had once had. Its inconvenience factor had finally reached parity with its “neato” factor.
So… the bottom line here is that Gozu once had a neato thing that he made the mistake of thinking of as “his.”
And some rotten corporate bastard done took it away from him.
And Gozu, yea and verily, was pissed off about that.
I don’t blame Gozu. I suspect that if I went into YOUR house and dropped my pants and crapped on something, you’d be angry about that… even if the item I chose to crap on was free, and cost you nothing, originally.
Wouldn’t you?
Now this sounds like the MS we all know and… well, expect.
Re: Mouse gestures.
You IE types might be the only ones who don’t know about mouse gestures. Opera has had them for a long time, and NN, being Mozilla with a paint job, has plugins that create them. When I want to go back in my browser, I just click right-left. To go forward, I click left-right. Once you have this, you get very annoyed at IE for not having it. You mean I have to actually find the mouse pointer and line it up with the back button just to go back?
Cheesesteak, you make a good point. I would upset if someone took over the site and switched then script.
But how many message boards are like the SD? There are maybe a couple of good ones out there, but not too many. Also, this place is a little society. If someone bought The Chicago Reader and decided to do away with the board, that would mean hundreds of lost friendships (and fun enemyships, too).
Actually, something like this happened to me when Salon started charging for access to its message board. I was SO pissed! I loved that place so much. But I don’t think I would have called Salon a “rapist” or “greedy” for considering the bottom line. It’s a business, not a charity for poor schmoes with no social life. Maybe running the message board was sucking them dry financially, and charging fees was their way of preventing layoffs. Or maybe not. How could I know?
How many free web-based email accounts are out there? And how is it really hurting Gozu by having to channel spam into a junk mail folder? I get tons of spam a day, but I still manage to get my important messages. Maybe if Gozu isn’t he should consider using a paid service (like the one provided by his ISP). It’s not MSN’s job to make sure Gozu gets his important email. I don’t know…maybe they care more about their PAYING customers.
It’s true that Hotmail sucks compared to other services, but it isn’t unacceptable. It’s functional for me and the thousands of other people who use it. If it was as horrible as Gozu is making it out to be, then we all would have dumped it a long time ago. But somehow, we manage to take the free service and use it to our advantage, with little to no complaints. Maybe we’re passive sheep. Maybe we don’t know any better. Or maybe we just don’t care.
If I got a free flashlight and found out that it didn’t work, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. In fact, I’d expect it to be broken and then be happy if I was proven wrong.
No. No it isn’t. Frankly, I don’t understand why people get all this spam on Hotmail. Or blame it on Hotmail. I suspect they are doing idiotic things and it’s actually their fault.
I have a Hotmail account and it’s the only account I’ve had for about 4 years now. I gave that address to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, ESPN, my bank, my student loan agency, plus many others. I have no spam filters turned on and I get two or three spam messages a day. And I just delete them and don’t worry about it. I’ve never used more than 10% of my storage, as I regularly clean out my account.
So, I don’t think it’s Hotmail, I think it’s the users.
Yahoo! mail sucks. Within hours of activating my Yahoo! email I was getting two to three times as much spam as I ever did on Hotmail. Pathetic.
Actually, of all the stupid bullshit you’ve posted in this thread, this is the most inane. Are you bad at math, or do you really have 4101 GB of disk storage? And, are you really so clueless as to believe that providing 4,000+ GB of disk space is quite as easy as putting one server on the Internet? Do you know how hard or easy it is to backup that much information? What about doing it without interrupting service to all the people that use the system? How about fault tolerance? What about performance? The cost of the hardware accounts for a tiny fraction of the total cost of ownership of mass storage.
If Yahoo! had one tenth as many users as Hotmail, you can be damn sure you’d get less storage space with them. Those of us who have had Yahoo! accounts since they first offered them can tell you of the erosion of features and service over the years as the free service became more and more popular. At least I can use Outlook to preserve as many of my Hotmail emails as I want.
:rolleyes:
With the left hand I hit ’ alt ’ along with the ’ left arrow '. Bingo, just went back.
Of course, if you were like me for a while and could only use one hand, then I see your point.
Is it long enough to require a comb? 
Even if were easier for Microsoft to give you more memory, it would be more cost effective for them to give you more storage. You’re right monstro, you know absolutely nothing about computers. 
I was wondering if someone would do the math. I actually have 420 Gb of storage. Ever heard about something called lossless compression? Ya know, zip, rar, png and whatnot? Did you know that you can compress a .txt file with ratios over 10:1 ? Thinks something along the lines of doublespace/drivespace or whatever it’s called on XP at the moment. I may be wrong, but i’d bet that some bulletin board programs use it for their archives. and what are emails mostly made of? Text! If you ran a huge mailserver and wanted millions of customers, you’d be a fool to leave everything uncompressed. The money you’d have to spend on the extra processors needed to keep everything running fast is very small compared to the money you’d save by only buying 100 HDs instead of a thousand.
Now that we’ve got the technical side out of the way, are you obtuse? The whole story about the 2.1 million inboxes was an anecdote I used to put things and numbers in perspective for “that guy”, I think it was monstro.
But hey, you’re obviously somewhat of a techie so let’s play around with some numbers:
According to Microsoft, there are around 100 millions hotmail users. Let’s see…
2Mb*100,000,000 / 10 = 20 Tb
20 Tb = roughly 137 scsi HDs of 146 Gb each.
A quick check in pricewatch tells me that each HD costs around $175, Let’s say microsoft gets them at bulk price and cut that to $150 to make numbers a little more appealing to our math allergic friends. Let’s also elevate the number of SCSI HDs to 200 to provide the necessary redundancy to ensure data in the raid won’t be lost unless lightening strikes. that gives us:
200 * 150 = 30 grands. WHOAH! A WHOLE 30 grands! dude… microsoft will have to sell some brooms to cover that expense up. Sure, there are a lot more expenses, but you have to think mega corporation here, not lonely dude in his garage man. The most important thing to consider is that increasing storage will barely make a dent in their total budget. Pay for the equipment, pay the dudes who install it, hire a few people to ensure proper maintenance, pay a lil bit more in electricity every month and voila! you’ve got yourself 5Mb instead of 2. How much could it possibly cost? a few hundred grands to get it all setup and maybe half a million a year to maintain?
As I said, it’s all a question of perspective. How much money does hotmail make directly anyways. Let’s forget about the positive and reinforcing global impact of hotmail on other microsoft sections and look at the revenue of hotmail alone. let’s suppose 5% of the users have given up and are paying the $35 a year. 5,000,000 * 35 = enough money for me to live like a king for the rest of my life. a.k.a 175 million dollars. and advertising must bring them some good money. at 100 million ads seen a day by all those people combined and 1 cent for each of these views, that’s still a million bucks a day. My numbers could be off but they’re good enough to give us a perspective. Perspective is good, but sleep is better.
it’s 4:00 am and I need to go to sleep. But it was fun to actually explore this a little.
good night
I have used hotmail for years. I use Outlook Express to access it and it works great as it works as if it were a POP3 account. Hotmail filters away 95% of the spam and I delete the rest. no problem. And the price is right.
I agree with the OP, I don’t care if HotMail’s free – it still sucks.
A helpful suggestion:
I have my filters set to exclusive (only people in my address book get through), everything else is junked EXCEPT if it contains the magic words (well I’m not telling you my secret magic words, but say for instance they are) “magic words”. Works quite well as a system.
How much spam you get is much more a result of who you have given the address to, than who is providing the address. I’ve had my current Yahoo address for almost a year, and have used it steadily for job searching activities, and receive nearly no spam whatsoever.
That isn’t event true. If you are going to complain you should at least be upset about the right thing.
From Hotmail Help:
If you don’t use your email once a month then it probably isn’t that important to you anyway.
Also what your e-mail addy is makes a difference- spammers often use scripts for common names so that “bob@hotmail.com” gets spam even if he’s never used his account.
Good point Mojo, that would do it too. My Yahoo account is comprised of my first and last name, and would be extremely unlikely to be generated from a script, as I have a somewhat uncommon last name.
Why the fuck does anyone still use Hotmail? There are so many other, better-featured, spam-free accounts.
I KNOW Microsoft is allowing spammers (paid?) access to my account - or letting them hack in - because the settings on my account are the highest, which means only people on my Friends list can email. Yet still penis/viagra etc spam gets in. FWIW I don’t use the account anymore, I check in occasionally out of curiosity, and I still use the handle for MSN messaging.
Hotmail is SHIT. Get an account somewhere else. Sadly Mail.com no longer offers free accounts, but it’s well worth minimum US$15 dollars a year to get an account.
Are there really ISPs that don’t provide at least one email account? Even our cheapo $10/month dialup we have now (we’re tightening our belts temporarily) gives us one. We’ve used 8 different providers over the last few years, due to frequent relocations, and most of them gave us multiple email accounts. Otherwise, I can’t think of a reason that one would need to use a free email service, unless your only source of internet access is a public library.
I do have a Yahoo account, but I use it only for registering on websites. That way, I get no spam on my ISP-provided account. Works for me.
Well, the profit margin is lousy, but they make it up in volume.