God damnit, Hotmail.

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m sick of this shit. The first message I send in each session makes me go through a verification page with scrambled text that I have to type in before I can send the message. I appreciate their attempts to thwart spam bots, but their methods strike me as bullshit.

I have to reattach any files I tried to send with the first message. Fucking WHY? Since what I usually tried to attach was a word file anyway, now I just paste it in the body of the message. Apart from that, it’s only the FIRST message that takes me through this. I don’t see why the spam bots can’t just be activated after circumventing the scrambled text manually. Is my understanding of how they function flawed or what?

But that’s all trivial. The most infuriating thing of all is that the distorted text has these squiggles and slashes underlying it that are sometimes hard to distinguish from a 1 or a lower case L. The size and angle of each character is different too, so there’s no consistent basis for me to decide whether something’s in the background or is supposed to go in the text box. So every other time I have to take another stab at it.

Way to make sure, guys. The spam bots might give up after that first try, but I don’t. Instead I have to jump through your bullshit hoops and play guessing games as to whether or not your indecipherable chicken scratches are letters. I just want to send my goddamned email, you bastards.

Bah. I’m just going to switch to using my gmail account for all my real business with people from now on and use my hotmail address for shopping, since all those places either spam me or sell my address to spammers anyway.

2

I was going to come in, offer you a gmail account, wean you off Microsoft’s crappy (free) service; you already have gmail. And you probably have 50 invites attached to your account. Make a “serious stuff” gmail account and a “junk name” gmail account. Foreswear stupid hotmail altogether (if only I could convince my parents to do the same).

3

My sister has Parkinson’s, and insists on using Hotmail. Twice recently she’s written me a long email, which is a real struggle for her since she has zero fine motor control, and the damn thing arrived blank at my end. And of course nothing was to be found in her sent mail, either.

I’m trying to persuade her that if she’s going to use their crappy email service, she should at least draft long posts in Notepad so she doesn’t have to duplicate efforts, especially considering how difficult it is for her. She’s surprisingly hard to persuade considering how much work it would save her.

I haven’t even made a dent in trying to persuade her to switch to gmail.

4

People still use hotmail?

I’m still a bit pissed at how Microsoft so transparantly gutted it when they bought it, never have I seen a service go from great to crappy in such a short period of time.

5

Yeah, the whole reason I got it was to use it to divert the attention of spammers and such when I’d buy something or register for one of the “free” message boards, but lately I’ve been using it to exchange email with my family. Time to remedy that. :smack:

6

I hate hotmail. I still have one account as a junk account, but other than that, I just use Gmail. By the way, I have a whole bunch of Gmail invites, so if anyone coming in here to rant about Hotmail wants one, email me.

7

I don’t use hotmail as my main account. It’s mainly just for MSN. However when I do use it I don’t have any problems. Seems like I’m the only one!

8

May I hijack a little and bitch about Yahoo Mail for a moment, too? Usually I have no problem with it (and I pay the $20/year for Yahoo Mail Plus, because I like the extras), but a day or so ago I started getting this stupid “Welcome to the new and improved Yahoo Mail Plus!” page that I have to click through every single time I go to mail.yahoo.com – whether I’m already signed in or not. The worst part is that the service is exactly the same as it was before this annoying page started appearing: it isn’t new or improved! :mad:

I’m not annoyed enough – yet – to switch e-mail services, but it’s starting to get pretty old.

(Thanks for letting me vent; doesn’t seem worth starting a new thread about. :))

9

If we’re bitching about Yahoo, now THAT I can do. I keep getting that stupid ‘type in these letters in the box’ thing. They’ve been asking all week. Ahh!

10

I have spam-dump email addresses with both Hotmail & Yahoo, but c’mon, I don’t actually use those email accounts. Does anyone?

Ok, I did actually use a hotmail account for awhile, but they decided I should pay for it to make it functional with my computer’s email program. Screw that.

Gmail baby, all the way.

11

I have Yahoo! mail and I’ve never really had a problem. I’ve never had to type in any stupid letters or anything, but I don’t have Plus!. Maybe Plus! means Plus silly hoops to jump through.

12

Hmm, haven’t seen that yet. Thank goodness. :slight_smile:

I sent an e-mail to Yahoo yesterday whining about the superfluous click-through page; I don’t expect a reply, but if I get a timely one I’ll let y’all know what they say.

Of course we do, and there’s really no need for the condescension. :dubious:

I got my first e-mail address in 1997, and I signed up with Rocketmail – which, as we know, switched to Yahoo a year or so later. I could have kept my “@rocketmail” address, but decided to change to the shorter “@yahoo.” It has been my primary e-mail account ever since, and I have never had a significant problem with it.

I’ve looked at Gmail, and it just isn’t right for me. I don’t like the way that messages are threaded instead of put into folders; I prefer the folder system. I have never needed to search my e-mail, so that isn’t a selling point for me. And it doesn’t let me send mail from my other POP accounts, which I can do with Yahoo Mail Plus and I find extremely useful. Doesn’t make Yahoo Mail superior to Gmail or Hotmail, it just means it is the best service for me.

Only in the past few days. I’ve had Plus for more than a year, with no problem until now (and now isn’t really even a problem, just an annoyance; the service itself works fine). I really like the extras I get with Plus – more than just the POP stuff – and (obviously) I feel that $20/year is worth them. Heck, it’s not much more than I pay for the SDMB. :wink:

13

No you’re not, I use it as my primary too, and have never had any kind of real problem. I agree the letters in the box to copy are sometimes a pain in the ass to read, and it takes a couple tries, but after - when they say you may have to re-attach attachments? I’ve never had to, they’re there every time.

I don’t pay for the enhanced Hotmail either. Granted, when I say my primary e-mail, I mean my primary personal e-mail. The bulk of my daily activity is on the work e-mail, even those personal contacts that I write to most during the day, but Hotmail has always worked fine for me.

14

In my (admittadly) quick glance at Yahoo’s Mail Plus service, it looks like the only extras you get with it that gmail doesn’t give away for free is stationary and a 20 MB message limit. Are those really worth $20 to you?

15

Thanks for the condescension. :rolleyes: You admit to giving Mail Plus only a cursory look, but you couldn’t simply ask me which features I think are worth $20?

For starters, if you go back and read the entire post you quoted from, you’ll see that I wrote “[Gmail] doesn’t let me send mail from my other POP accounts, which I . . . find extremely useful.” In addition to my main Yahoo address, I have two ISP addresses and one university e-mail address: I can send mail from those three accounts as easily as I send mail from my Yahoo account, using the Yahoo interface. As far as I can tell, Gmail only offers the same POP access as nearly everyone else.

Also, Mail Plus has disposable, customizable e-mail addresses to help combat spam. If I need an e-mail address to register for some random site that I don’t care about, I can create a customized address that goes to my Yahoo inbox (instead of creating a new Yahoo or Hotmail account). If that address starts generating spam, I can delete it and create a new one (and there is a way to tell which e-mail address my incoming mail was sent to). There is no limit on the number of disposable e-mail addresses I can create. If Gmail offers something similar, they’re not advertising it.

Additionally, with Mail Plus I have the ability to archive old messages to my hard drive, where they can be read by MS Outlook. I use this feature to keep entire folders of messages that have to do with guys I’ve dated, defunct clubs that I’ve run, etc. I don’t need access to them on a regular basis anymore, but I don’t want to lose the messages entirely, so I archive them locally. Again, if Gmail offers something similar, they should be saying so.

And, I see no ads at all. Gmail still includes “small and unobtrustive” advertising. (Yahoo only promises no graphical ads with Mail Plus, but I’ve yet to see even a text ad.)

I don’t give a shit about stationery. Never used it, never will. I don’t even format my messages – I prefer to send plain text. And I don’t care about message limits or storage; Yahoo’s free 1GB would have been fine with me. But are those other extras “really” worth $20/year to me? Hell yes. Do I care if you think they’re worth $20? Hell no. :smiley:

16

I don’t use Yahoo for email, but I use it for Yahoo Groups out of necessity. I’ve been directed to that fucking sign-in page all week with the “decifer these characters” box every single time I wish to post to the groups. I don’t understand the purpose of annoying me every time I wish to post to a invitation-only Yahoo group, especially when I’m already signed in. Grrrr.

17

I was getting that too. It irritated me sufficiently that I complained about it, and I actually got a useful reply. You just have to clear your cookies, and it should fix the problem. Of course, it also means that I now have to try to remember my password for any site that I had set to remember me…

18

Thanks for the tip! They’ve seem to have already stopped asking me now, but if they start again I shall follow the advice.

19

Yes, I just got that same reply from Yahoo, too, about my “continue to Mail Plus” annoyance. But clearing the cookies didn’t help. :frowning: