The thread about what happened to MySpace got me wondering about this. When I was in college in the late '90s Hotmail was huge. In addition to their campus e-mail, damn near everybody had a Hotmail account.
These days most people I know use Gmail or Yahoo, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a non-spam Hotmail address pop up in my inbox. So what happened?
Simply put, there are too many better choices available. I always found Hotmail to be the least user-friendly of any of the free e-mail services I’ve used, by a wide margin.
I still use the hotmail address I got in 1996. I am far too lazy to change.
I still use mine, too, which I’ve had for maybe 15 years. But it’s just from inertia. I have a gmail account now as well, and that’s what I set up for anyone who needs a new account.
Microsoft is bundling several online features under live.com these days, with the very user friendly Skydrive as a flagship in my book, which is “integrated” with Office 2010 and everything. If you go to hotmail.com, you’re redirected to live.com. They are on to something there, I think.
However I agree that Hotmail still is sort of “junk mail” and I don’t use it at all, except for these instances where you have to give away your email address for registering or something.
The biggest problem for me regarding Hotmail/“Live mail”, aside of it feeling a bit awkward, is that if you mail somebody, that person gets a commercial type of message too about MSN or some crap. That is also a problem with Live as such, there’s “ads” about MSN and so forth.
As a side note, Hotmail has a bad rep (which many of Microsoft consumer products have, as you know); I’ve heard things from guys in the IT business going like: “They guy sent in his CV from a Hotmail address, now how serious is that? Those go straight to the trash bin.” – That’s one of the reasons Microsoft is going away from the name “Hotmail”, I think, using @live.com instead.
A lot of sites seem to have trouble sending cofirmations and registrations to hotmail addresses. It seems to get lost in their filter.
I’ve never had anything get lost to a gmail account, but I’ve had people send me things from hotmail, that just doesn’t get through. I’m assuming somehow it gets trapped in the hotmail filter.
I’ve seen a number of sites, say “Do not use hotmail accounts, you won’t be able to get the confirmation number to complete the registration.”
Not being in the IT business myself, I wonder what is an ideal e-mail address for an applicant in that field to have? Does it really make that much difference?
gmail is probably ok, or at least “better” than hotmail or yahoo, but really, I would expect anyone reasonably serious in the technical parts of IT to have at least one domain name (and corresponding email address) of their own.
That seems just stupid to me. Why would you expect that someone’s hobby be work related.
+1
Because in programming/IT it’s my experience that the people who are actually good at it view it as a hobby.
I use a hotmail address for “unimportant” emails such as notifications from online forums 
Not in my experience. There are some that maintain there own email but most don’t.
I used to have a Hotmail account until 7 or 8 years ago, when I couldn’t register MSN Messenger to that account and get notices of arriving e-mail anymore. Because of that, I started checking the account so infrequently that they closed it and wiped everything in it.
I had a Hotmail account for a while, about seven years ago. Then I went on vacation and didn’t check email for two weeks. I didn’ t have internet access while I was on vacation. When I came back home, I tried to log into my account and got a message that said I hadn’t logged in for ten days and so they deleted all my email, incoming and outgoing. I was free to “reactivate” the account if I wanted, but I couldn’t get back any of the messages I had saved. I closed out of the account and NEVER logged in again. I am beyond disgusted with Hotmail. Never EVER again.
Are you sure? Ten days? I’ve been away from Hotmail for months, and this has never happened to me.
Maybe they just delete purple prose. 
Still use Hotmail. Too much trouble to change.
I do recall Hotmail at least used to have some sort of expiration feature, but I thought it was longer than 10 days. Maybe a couple of months? Maybe not. But a Thai lady of our acquaintance became distraught in the late 1990s because of this. Begged me to have it restored for her, which was odd, because I’m in no way a tech kind of person, and even if I were, I certainly didn’t have the pull to get Hotmail to restore her account. Her reasoning seemed to be that I was a farang (Westerner), e-mail was a Western invention, and so I could do this. I did help her register a new account, but she seemed to feel I was incompetent for not being able to restore her old one.
This is what I remember, too. The expiration was on the order of months, not days.
Not in my experience. I’m part of a team of software engineers. We all have lives outside of work that include our spouses and children – not more sitting in front of computers.