I got rid of my Hotmail account after one of them “expired” for inactivity. To hell with that. I use Yahoo and Gmail accounts and am quite content to never again use Hotmail/Live/Big/SomeDamnThing/WhatEverTheyAreCallingItThisWeek.
I think a lot of people got so fed up with spam that they abandoned their Hotmail accounts, using them only for registering for websites, and so on. I keep my Hotmail and Yahoo accounts active, but only for this purpose. These people will then have set up a new account on one of the new providers that had cropped up since, such as Gmail, and been a lot more careful about what they use it for.
The Yahoo one used to be my main address but was the first to be abandoned to the tide of spam. I just logged in to see how it’s doing - 15,260 unread messages in the inbox, and only 159 in the spam folder, which tells you about all you need to know about how good its filters are.
I still have my Hotmail account. I was such an early subscriber to email that I got a Hotmail account with just my first and last names strung together. But no-one else had email (even though I kept telling people about it) so it expired. Then I had my names with a period in the middle. Same thing. Then an underscore. Same thing. Eventually by the time there were people to communicate with I had a nonsense name. So I use it for things where I don’t feel like revealing my real name.
To those expressing this sentiment, how does this make sense? I gave up my HM account after trying Gmail. Hotmail became too much work. If it really is lazyness wouldn’t you expend less energy in the long run by using a more effecient program?
The way I use email, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo, are equally efficient for me. I’ve had my own domain name and email for years and years now (so I don’t really use those guys), but I don’t really notice the difference between the big three email providers. I’ve never had any issues with Hotmail.
The expiration for Hotmail accounts used to be 30 days. I remember this very clearly because I’d have to remember to log in to my Hotmail account at least once a month to keep from losing all my saved messages. Annoying.
Gmail is so much better that they’re practically not even in the same category.
Yahoo accounts would expire, as well, for inactivity. Don’t know if they still do, but I lost one after not checking it for something like 3 months or so. Didn’t really care, as it was mainly a spam account.
Still have and use my Hotmail account. Don’t recall exactly when I opened it, but almost two years ago, I got a nice message thanking me for using them for over ten years.
Never had a problem with spam, despite using that address for all my shopping, forums, Facebook, etc.
According to Compete, unique, active Hotmail users in September 2010 were 48.5 million, versus 25.1 million for Gmail. Yahoo is still number one at 72.8 million.
It was the deleting mail after inactivity thing that did it for me, I’m pretty sure it was 1month (at least at one point) You lose all your email records because you’ve been away for a while, you aren’t going to use hotmail for anything serious ever again.
I was quite surprised to find, while working at the border agency, that at least one country’s UK embassy operates through a yahoomail acount. I was positive that set of documents were fake :eek:
I suppose, if it’s good enough for Sarah Palin…
I had to give up my 12 year-old hotmail account because of spoofing. I was getting scores of replies a day to messages that I didn’t send. There didn’t seem to be any way of fixing it from my end, so I just decided to close it down.
I have a Yahoo, but Hotmail is my main email provider. It’s been user friendly and completely spam-free.
As a software developer, if someone judged my resume by my email provider (assuming it was not an inappropriate word), then I would be happy if they tossed it in the garbage.
The last thing I want to do is work for someone that is not very smart/wise, and judging a candidate by email provider represents a pretty limited view of the world.
I personally have interviewed many people with a wide variety of email providers, there does not appear to be a correlation between email provider and technical skills.
There’s really never been any reason for me to change. I know there’s a lot of Hotmail hate out there, but I’ve rarely had any problems with it. I almost never get spam, and I understand that’s unusual; I have no idea why I don’t get much, but I know people who get tons of it, on Hotmail and other accounts. Changing would entail notifying an extremely large, to say the least, number of people and organizations to let them know. I do also have a Gmail account I picked up years ago, but after trying it for a bit, it just didn’t grab me, and now I check it maybe twice a year to see if anything’s in there.
One thing I’m not fond of Gmail about is it apparently reads your messages for advertising purposes. Maybe no human does, but software does. At least, an American friend here was complaining about that. Said keywords in his messages would be used for targeted advertising. Such as one time he mentioned something about his maid in a message to a friend back Stateside, and suddenly his onscreen ads were reading “Click here to find Filipino maids” and such.
Me too. ** Expired for inactivity** and no way to get all the recent, or my old saved messages, since nothing was saved. It might have been 30days, but I think it is stupid and not useful to have an email account wiped out if you dont use it for a few weeks.
Absolutely sure. I was livid. I am sure they changed their policy to make the expiration period longer than ten days since then, but I don’t care. I will never, EVER use Hotmail again. There was some really sentimentally precious stuff to me in the deleted emails.
Yes that is correct. Yahoo accounts expire after 4 months of inactivity, and GMail after 9 months.
http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Logging-In-en/browse_thread/thread/62382110b7a811fa
I find it interesting how people only hate Microsoft for this.
Just a data point: I recently logged into two email accounts that I have not used in more than two years, one with Yahoo Mail and the other with Gmail.
Yahoo Mail gave me a message that because my account was dormant, all my email had been deleted. When I logged in, I found that although my mail was gone, all my contacts, my Y!M stuff, and other account settings were preserved. They did not “delete” my account, they just cleaned it up a bit.
Gmail was another story. When I logged into my abandoned Gmail account, it worked perfectly–they never deleted, deactivated, deprecated, or d-anything-ed it. For over two years they kept my archive of crappy newsletters and sales promos even though I had never logged into the account. I guess that they do not worry about space at Google.
Oh, I am not a fan of Yahoo over that policy at all. I remember back in the olden days of the Internet (like 2001 or something) and signing up for a Yahoo account to play Fantasy Baseball. When I went back next spring to play again, I was told my account was closed due to inactivity and there was nothing I could do to get the name back because Yahoo keeps deleted usernames out of circulation for years after they go inactive.
A big part of this is HotMail adding advertising messages to the actual message. If a candidate called on the phone and played a spammy advert before they started talking, few people would wait out the advert, and most of those that did would only do so in order to cuss out the caller, bang the receiver on the desk five times and hang up. How impressed would you be with someone who showed up for a job interview wearing a Guinness tee-shirt: Brilliant?
Sending advertising to everyone you email because you are too cheap to pay an ISP for an email account really annoys everyone…your friends may tolerate it, but it is not the foot I’d want to start out on when trying to get hired.
Gmail still says cheap, but at least it puts the advertising burden on the sender rather than the receiver.
Oh yeah, Gmail does robo-read your mail for targeted advertising. They tell you they will do this in the user agreement.