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Hotmail Loses Customer Files
Rick Zeman writes "News.com is reporting that Microsoft's Hotmail service has lost customers' files 'due to 'system events.' The particular user cited, of course, has no recourse because of the broad disclaimers companies such as Microsoft hide behind; however, you are getting what you pay for. The scariest part of the article, however, is when a spokesman for iBackup, an Internet-based backup company, disclaims,'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."
I also had a nightmare at one stage with Hotmail. I logged on one day and everything in sent items was gone. It was due to 'changes in service'. I was not amused and of course there is no way one can actually contact Hotmail - hell I don't know where this woman found their number! I'm impressed.
Needless to say I changed provider which is also free and gives me 6Mb instead of 2 (mail.vu).
Outlook 2002+, or recent versions Outlook Express allow you to add Hotmail as an email provider. You can then drag and drop your folders to your local PST, and back that up.
PRECISELY.
If you can't bear the idea of something being lost, it's YOUR JOB to do what's necessary to save it.
Alexandria Felton logged on to her Hotmail account last month and was shocked to find that all of her saved files were gone.
At stake was years' worth of personal and business correspondence, photos and the itinerary for a recently purchased trip...
Alexandria is a moron. It's a *free* service, you get what you pay for. No backup medium is 100% reliable, but most reasonable people would consider Hotmail to be a particularly stupid place to keep important information.
-Styopa
Pretty easy.
Thunderbird->Tools->Offline & Disk Space->Make the messages in my Inbox available when I am working offline (check).
Then feel free to back up the local files as you please.
Bonus points for saying 'raises an interesting question' rather than 'begs the question'.
-Reid
Hotmail Popper lets you use your favourite email program with hotmail, works fine with Thunderbird.
Oh, and 2001? isn't your article a bit dated...
And finally This Shows that hotmail is currently under IIS5.0. I'm no microsoft troll, but as someone said, they are 'eating their own dog food' on this one.
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
Anyone running a Linux box can use hotwayd to access their Hotmail account through a POP client like Mozilla Mail. Since Mozilla has such fantastic junk mail filters, it easily gets the two or so messages that Hotmail's filter misses. I have mailing lists that I subscribed to through Hotmail, so keeping mail on their servers is not a viable option.
However, anyone running a business on one of these services is counting on the reliability of delivery, which you might not get if you ran your own domain off a DSL line. Reliability of storage is a totally different matter. Anyone running a medium business off Hotmail accounts deserves what they get. At that point they should get serious and look into at least a server closet with UPS, partial T1, etc.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Incidentally hotmail spam is unblockable. I.E. The unrequested marketing that hotmail sends you, if you try and block the address it says you can't, so that hotmail can send you "important" information.
im in ur