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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."
There are plenty of other places people could go to for free email, or they could use their very own ISP for email service. But for some bizzare reason people just want to have a @hotmail.com email address. I dunno, maybe it gives people a fuzzy feeling having an @hotmail.com account rather than @yourisp.com...
It will be interesting to see the final EULA for gmail and their stance on loss of data.
It would also be interesting to look at the paid email providers too. Does the ISPs that offer IMAP hosting do backups of their customer's emails? I quite like the idea of IMAP, but this issue raises an interesting question. With POP3 email, your emails are stored on your own computer, so you can easily backup email. How easy is it to backup and restore IMAP email boxes?
At stake was years' worth of personal and business correspondence, photos and the itinerary for a recently purchased trip
why would someone store such important info on hotmail ? The notices saying they can't garentee your data won't disappear isn't there for PR. Its obvious things like this can happen so why not store it on something like a floppy. I mean hotmail doesn't even give you a lot of space. I haven't used it for a while but isn't it 3mb ? At least it was a free account and not one where he was paying for extra storage. That would have made it a hell of a lot worse if he was paying for the service.
Look who owns h0tm@il. Seriously though, could you imagine the database beatings thier systems take? Im sure they have xx million email accounts on thier systems. If anyone here runs a server, you will know that even having a couple hundred people hitting a db (forum, cms, etc..) will hammer a db even on a decent machine. Most likely a raid failure, but of course, microsloth wont tell us anything more than "System Events"
and I had two personal hotmail accounts. Since I was on business and in a region were some of what was written in my email would be considered offensive and trust me, my life would have been put into jeopardy so I left the accounts alone. When I got back to the States, I had found that MS purged my two accounts. Nice, huh? When I emailed them, they said, "Too bad, so sad. If you don't access your account every 60days or whatever it is, you loose, f-off."
Don't use MS products or services if you don't have too. It's not cause I think they suck, it's because they don't care. It's as simple as that.
GET BIGGER, LONGER LASTING ... e-mail storage.
Seriously though, if you RTFA, it's just one customer in this case, although the summary implies it was more - presumably because the article states that similar incidents have occurred in the past..
Why would iBackup offer it? For some reason, software makers (myself included) have been able to get away without guaranteeing anything for a long time. We don't finish projects sometimes, and even if we do, we don't guarantee you even get what you want.
What is interesting, mind you, is that some consider this more realistic. The way Product Liability cases have been going the last 50 years, software is kind of lucky not to be included. Think of the awards for McDonalds coffee 'users;' people who eat glass and complain there was no sticker saying not to.
If we demand courts throw away the disclaimers of liability by companies like iBackup or Microsoft, it could definitely hurt open source. If they throw out Windows' disclaimers of liability the GPL's disclaimer might not be far off. What if people could sue free software authors directly? That would be scary.
It's a double-edged sword, and frankly, I don't know which way I'd like it to go. Anyone?
Do you honestly expect your backup provider to cover you in the event of a gamma ray burst in the stellar neighbourhood which vapourizes half the planet within 5 minutes? An extreme example to be sure, but 100% coverage is not realistic, nor is it financially desirable.
.. :)
Interesting example
The first thing I thought of was what happens when some idiot at the client company shuts off the backup program on their side? The backup company can't do anything about it - besides maybe notice the backup didn't take place and call them - even then, say it happens on a Friday.. they're likely not going to be backed up all weekend. Office burns down, and there's an old backup.. the backup company can't be held responsible for that.
Speak before you think
I have a hotmail account myself because some of my friends use MSN messenger (I use Gaim myself- find me on Yahoo, ICQ, MSN and of course, Jabber). Glad I never actually employed this mail account for mail purposes...
Do other services have a "no business use" type disclaimer? Is Google liable if they chuck out 800MB of your GMail?
Well,
/.
I thing that 'system events' may happen with any service provider, but because it happened to a MS related company, that's why it's being trumpeted on
While I've exported my important email to Thunderbird, I still have plenty of non-crucial stuff in Hotmail. It wouldn't have been the end of the world had the files been deleted, but it was pretty disconcerting none-the-less.
I finally sent them an email explaining the problem and my annoyance. I recieved a form e-mail saying I would get a response within 24 hours.... which I didn't. Though all my e-mails have stayed intact so far... but it's only been a few days. If the problem doesn't come back, it seems to imply the problem is fixable.
with the price of the usb keyrings being so cheap surely its worth saving your email onto one of them where ever you go in the world?
...
The true value of hotmail is your email account is accessable anywhere.
Why not an Isp email account ?
How often do you change providers?
Myself I have had accounts with
demon, fci, virgin, bt, NTL tiscali...
If you use the ISP's email services you have to migrate your email account a pain in the
for me far worse than Hotmail is Outlook Express.
Downloaded Email from hotmail to my PC.
deleted my Email from my hotmail account.
(regaining the space to recieve new messages).
15 Minutes later my Pc logs itself into hotmail and sync's outlook express with my hotmail account.
DELETING my unread mail from my PC.
Is it wrong to think that hotmail is the postbox where i collect my mail and when I want to sync my mail I mean get any mail from the hotmail server that isn't already on my Pc so I can read it off line?
I am sure everyone keeps all their important mail on the mat behind the front door and any mail anywhere else, such as your desk is unimportant and should go in the trash.
I think thats when I really started to hate Microsoft.
John.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Now that is a lie by omission if I ever saw one. Was it a hardware failure ? A software failure ? An operator mistake ? An external attack ? A natural catastrophe ?
Of course no one can guarantee a 100% rate of security. In commercial aerial transport the norm is one incident in a million of movements, it'd be nice if the same rate was enforced in IT as a general rule.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Respected? No way! If it said "we can't provide a 100% guarantee that we can recover the data that we make two different off-site backups for," then I can understand. Or even, "we can only guarantee that 95% of your nighty backups will be successful" is OK.
But the quote says they won't even guarantee it gets backed up at all! They don't even need to attempt it. It's like providing an email service and not guaranteeing that your SMTP server isn't pointing to
I don't get all the spam comments. Since they made changes to their spam filters a while ago (4 or 5 months ago maybe?) I've had maybe 1 spam a week in my inbox, and a few a day in my junk mail folder. I used to get dozens a day in my inbox.
Don't like it? You run what is almost certainly the most spammed mail service in the world and do a better job.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
The problem is that for most people Hotmail is NOT a stupid place to keep important info.
Its backed by Microsoft so oviously its secure.
Just remember that most people who use Hotmail are not Geeks and they do beleave the hype.
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
My netscape mail has been completely cleaned out at least twice already, including all of my folders. Anyone else have this experience there? I mainly use it as my junk/product mail address, so I only check it, like, once a month or so... maybe that's a factor?
:P
:P
In the mean time, I've been changing my junk/product mail to yahoo.com, since I can download it into my maildir using fetchyahoo.pl . That way, at least it goes through their spam filters once before going through my local spamassasin daemon.
Netscape's webmail also really sucked in that you could only delete spam a pageful of 25 at a time
Just so that I'm marginally on topic, I've been able to avoid hotmail ever since they got bought by MS way back when. I take it this data loss means they finally succeeded in migrating from FreeBSD to Win** Server?
The big companies don't give a damn and we're being trained to pay more for less service, or at best, greater convenience with lesser quality. Aren't backups like insurance? If you don't have a guaranteed backup what's the point? How am I supposed to sleep at night knowing I MIGHT have my files backed up? This reminds me of Ceridian, who cold called our office offering to do our payroll for us. They would cut the cheques and pay the government the taxes and send us a report, all for pennies per employee. The only problem is they wouldn't guarantee the cheques would be correct, or the taxes would actually be filed with the government -- and if the government came after me they weren't liable in any way -- we were. Needless to say we still do our own payroll.
Take me for instance: I do a 100% guaranteed backup of the server files at work every day. I even burn them to DVD in case an EMP Blast or magnetic solar flare wipes out my hard drive backups.
Okay okay, so I'm in the Pr0n industry... and I'm not the official backup guy... and I'm not even allowed in the Server Room... but trust me, 100% reliable backups are possible if you are dedicated enough.
And I do it for free.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
I use mine on Usenet posts and Slashdot. It allows people I don't know to get in touch without exposing a real address. The spam gets filtered to my junkbox, which is good. However, the "Microsoft update" virus crud (harvesting from Usenet) also goes there, and at 144k per "update" it doesn't take long to fill the freebee quota. I could have it immediately delete junkbox email, but there have been false positives. So I have to visit once a day or so to scan for real email, then flush the "updates" and the letters from PRINCE MOYO SITHOLE.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I've known that hotmail occasionally loses mail since... well, since before
they switched the hotmail servers over to NT, anyway. I wouldn't have expected
it to change since then, particularly since it's a free service. In other news,
Yahoo! mail occasionally has quite significant delays (several hours or more)
when sending or receiving, and some messages can get delayed a lot more than
others so that mail arrives out-of-order (which can be really weird if you're
on a mailing list).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I have a hotmail adress I use from time to time. And I can't say I have experienced much improvement in the spam-handling on my hotmail account.
And what pisses me off, is not all the spam which do reach my inbox, but all the 'real' emails which is put in the 'Junk E-Mail' folder.
"You run what is almost certainly the most spammed mail service in the world and do a better job."
I don't see any relevance here.. What's the difference between one e-mail adress and another one. Or someone running an e-mail service with 100 accounts or 1 million accounts? You can still use the same filtering and software for both, just on a different scale, hardwarewise.
As for the adresses, for a spammer they should be all the same... Or might it be that they know that hotmail adresses have poor spam filtering?
Too true. The administration at the large public library where I used to work seemed to view the underpriveledged types who would conduct most of their computing on our Wyse terminals more as unwelcome burdens than as "real" patrons.
These are people who needed to do simple stuff like type out a resume, write a two page book report for school, or whatever. I spent the better part of a year trying to persuade IS to put OpenOffice on a couple of unused PCs we had sitting around, and their response was, essentially, "Microsoft rulez! OOo droolz!"
"So are we going to put MS Office on the PCs for the public instead?"
"No, we can't afford the licenses."
I actually took my case all the way up to administration, and they as much as told me "We're a library, not a community center. They're lucky we don't block Hotmail."
Shit, they even locked the floppy drives on the few actual PCs (rather than Winterms) we had available for the public, to keep people from saving anything.
All this from one of the largest, and supposedly best, public library systems in the country.
I ended up writing a little PHP script that'll spit out either a preformatted resume or a simple letter-type html page and let you print them out from a browser. Took me an hour, and that was mostly getting the tables right for the resumes. The patrons, my immediate boss, and all of my co-workers were thrilled, but all I got from administration was a warning that I shouldn't have developed the app on company time.
Fuckers.
Hotmail, Yahoo, et al provide valuable services to people who couldn't otherwise get them.
Yeah, the corporations behind the services are only doing it to make a buck.
Yeah, they're free, and you get what you pay for.
Yeah, anybody who should know better, and could afford better, who does *anything* critical with Hotmail is an idiot.
But for some people, something is better than nothing.
hang brain.
I have looked at online applications for small businesses, including accounting, data storage, and CRM, but primary thing amoung many concerns is data loss. While Hotmail is not a business service, the comments from iBackup make me very wary about the responsibility of these types of companies for their customers' data.
That's great that you helped out like that, and really, really sad about the administrations attitude. Who do you they think uses the computers? Maybe kids who are doing papers or something... I don't know.
A computer is increasingly a requirement if you want to find a job or communicate at a professional level. And in a lot of ways, libraries are community centers - you can often take free classes, get tax advice, there are entertaining things for kids, etc.
Running a resource hungry MS operating system just so people can use a browser is a horrible waste of money. Just from the hardware perspective, it's way too expensive. Taking the software into account it gets really crazy.
However, most ISPs would seem to give email addresses with an account, so what stops people using that is beyond me. It has the added advantage of allowing people to store as much as their hardware will allow, and you can't access hotmail via an email client, so you can't download data to back it up.
The only way is to copy/paste it all, which is time consuming and pointless.
Although I'm not sure, I should think that there are free email accounts that allow access via POP... Does anyone know of any?
im in ur
So Hotmail really does have unstoppable built-in SPAM? Wow, I didn't see that on the butterfly commercials.