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Hotmail Means to Double Gmail Storage
deputydink writes "Osviews reports that Microsoft's free email service, Hotmail, is throwing down to Google by increasing the free storage to 2GB! I wonder how choked the Hotmail Plus subscribers will be."
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Holy storage wars!
2GB. That's nice and all, but when are they going to actually deliver on the 10MB they promised everyone? I don't use Hotmail, but my girlfriend does, and I'm unable to send her any attachments larger than about 500k because she keeps old emails...
But doesnt that mean just 150 customers per $100 HHD? :-S
Storage will increase by 1000%!!!
Until they come out with a free service that includes the installation of a server with a terabyte of storage in my basement.
Surely the subscribers will simply get yet a larger spam-box...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
I see no reason why google won't just increase their space by the same factor. Noone will use more than a few hundred megabytes (assuming you have rules that prevent online backups etc)
No I can save ALL of my spam... instead of the daily gigabytes worth.
So storage space is no longer the big attraction, since everybody can get lots.
;)
I bet the next big thing will be from whoever reaches the 700mb attachment limit
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
They haven't even upped the normal 2 meg ones yet...
:)
Not that I'm really bothered by it, it's just always fun to see huge claims.
Some of the storage space figures being bandied around are so outlandish that it wouldn't surprise me if someone trumps them all by offering free unlimited storage space (perhaps they already have).
:-)
They can always boot people from the service if they use too much space anyway.
You've probably noticed that people's noses get bigger as they get older. That's because old people are huge liars.
Webinterface, POP3/SMTP, server-side filtering and forwarding included.
Microsoft paid, what, $400 million for Hotmail. Then they must have paid quite a bit to port the back end to Windows. Now they are going to have increase the hardware of the back end considerably to compete with Gmail. And it's a free service.
Is that good business?
So far, it seems like it is all rumors.
First we heard that they were going to up to 250MB. Hasn't happened yet. Now 2GB. I'm not holding my breath.
If Hotmail would actually filter spam, and do something about the headache-inducing interface, -that- would be an improvement. Thank goodness for gotmail!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Ahh the wonders of competition.
But Hotmail still lacks all the great features of Gmail such as labels, conversations, and keyboard shortcuts. Hotmail won't be nearly as good as Gmail is.
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
Did they pick the name 'Hot' mail, because of it being a 'hot' service, or 'hot' as in full of hot air. They promise big, and deliver little.
I wonder how choked the Hotmail Plus subscribers will be
...it's not the first time that Redmond has screwed it's customers.
noone needs a 2gb limit . . . I use my hotmail ac all the time and it's kept at less than 30% full, so thats about 600k of mails, I delete allt he rest otherwise it's impossible to find the ones you actually need :)
My Portfolio
I have roughly all mails I've ever sent and received still in my archived folders. About 1.4Gigs worth of mostly useless correspondence. But hey I just can't part with it.
I've had some close calls with busted HDrives and other panic situations. But I'ts still there.
Now they are trying to tell me that all my mails since 1994 (or indeed from now until 2014) can be stored on web at no cost.
Doesn't anyone else have a "(good + good) (b + b) true" feeling?
I've defenitly got a "b-lieve it when IC it" feeling.
I'm especially interested in the "catch"...
... upgrade your girlfriend.
The coolest thing about gmail is the software itself, not the storage. It's excellent. I wish we had it at work-- no more searching for that e-mail someone sent you 6 months ago that you're sure you put in the "coding" folder-- or was it "scripting", or "ai", or "todo"? You could always use that global e-mail search function that only takes about 20 minutes. But hey, you're too busy slogging through tons of other e-mail you just got, because your filters suck.
I don't see why I'd WANT to keep 2 gigs on my hotmail account, unless they make it as full-featured and easy to use as gmail.
Well now with all the spam going around we can start using free email accounts as our next p2p app. Yay!
Moo!
I drive past the secret hotmail bunker in [REDACTED] washington every morning, but I have yet to see the long line of freight trucks delivering so many harddrives.
Yes, but do they run it on Linux?
..."Your Hotmail Account is Almost Full" system emails that try to persuade me to upgrade!
I am hotmail subscriber and have 1%/2000 mb used :) Also there is no longer ads if you've subscribed.
It costs 20$ / year. For free you get 250mb and ads.
Ehh, I dunno. I call BS on that. I know that Microsoft will eventually have to increase the limit of space given, but I somehow doubt that a company that was charging money for a tiny bit of space is all of a sudden going to just give out 2 GB for free. Do we know who the contributor was? Also... in the article it says that Microsoft won't bother us with graphic ads. Again, BS. I see more ads on Hotmail than I do on some pr0n sites. I highly doubt they'll just drop them.
You don't get gb's of storage as part of the 'free' account...get some sleep.
Let's buy tons of Google stocks waiting for the inevitable announcement of the new 4GB Gmail storage.
Yawn.
2GB you say? Time to write a hotmail filesystem module for Linux :)
wtf do you need 2gb for? recieving files but that'd take forever to download a 1 gb file from hotmail lol. man that's scary. 2gb only means lots, and lots, and lots of SPAM. and more spam and MORE SPAM.
In Soviet Russia, I, for one, welcome our new Gigabyte bearing overlords for YOU!
Whos more evil? The Devil whos heading towards World OS Domination or the Devil who wants to provide you personalized ads by reading your mail ...
The storage isn't the biggest reason why I love gmail so much, it's the features that it brings with it. The ability to search through my mail, the technique of orginization using labels, the conversations being kept together and easy to read. Doing active development and being active on mailing lists gets a lot easier when I can click on a conversation, read the last six emails in that thread and get up to speed on what the problem is. Hotmail may go to 2GB, but that's nothing without all the other features that gmail offers.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
In my opinion, 1 GB is already so much that other features matter when I decide what mail service to use. It's not like a 10 GB mail service is 5x better than a 2 GB one. And it's not like this change would make Hotmail twice as good as Gmail.
I'm not saying this just because I like Gmail, since I *would* consider another service if Gmail just offered 20 MB while another offered 1 GB. It's just that these storage spaces are no longer an issue for me at 1 GB.
More like the opposite -- risking having so much mail and suddenly something bad happens to the online service.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17949
No sources are cited.
This applies only to the Hotmail Plus service, which is not free.
They are increasing their limit for the free subscribers, but to 250MB. Hotmail plus or whatever, which is like $10 a year, gets the 2GB bump.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Well, I hope somebody tells M$ that GMail is not only about storage. The interface is so clean and fast that it's hard to consider any other options, let alone the search capabilities, which I have found really useful. On a sidenote, some friends and I were discussing on how useful it would be to have that search power in our existing Yahoo! Group (which we created back when it was eGroups). We have a lot of content (other than forwarded jokes) worth mining into as the years have passed.
This is a war, yes. but I maintain my claim: the winner will not be who stores the most junk, but he who provides the best tools to manage it.
First.. the google ad system is MUUCH less annoying than MSN's practice of popups (yes, I know, get google toolbar) and annoying large image and flash ads.
I have had a gmail account for a while now, and I am using 15 MBs of it. You dont know how hard it is to try and burn away storage in an email account like that.
Sure, 2 GB is twice as big, but no one will ever use it. Doubtful that anyone will ever use even 1GB of storage in email. That coupled with the ad system makes msn a big loser without major overhauls that our fisher-price pal M$ is probably not willing to do.
Plus, MSN will probably want to charge $6.99 a month for the storage...
insert weak rimshot here
So ya-boo sucks to the rest of you... admitidly I've had the account since around 98' so I was probably early on the list.
I guess it is about equal with the devil that "reads your email" to determine whether or not it is spam. The personalized ads thingy is probably just an add-on module to their spam filter. Two faces of the same program. Nothing to see here, move along...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
RTFA... misleading /. headings strike again...
Reading the deeper linked article from the top linked article, which is: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17949/ It does not specifically mention the "free" snotmail account gets 2GB.
Reading M$N's page about it, http://www.imagine-msn.com/hotmail/en-us/ it looks like the M$N Plus accounts will get 2GB, which means the ones you pay $19.95/mo for. This is NOT the free snotmail account getting 2GB. These will get 250MB. Not GB, MB.
Jeez the /. editors need to do a little more fact checking eh? But /. editors actually RTFA??? Naaaahhhhh.
Google is still ahead in the actual FREE email storage space war. 100MB for Yahoo, 250MB for M$N. ... so, anyone got gmail beta invites? ;)
-----------
LinuxKnight
Wow! 2 Gigs?! That gives you room for lots of spam! Thank you, Microsoft!
Pft, hot air everywhere. In germany gmx.de offers 1 GB free storage, POP3 access and WebDAV for your files. Simply type webdav://mediacenter.gmx.de/ in Konqueror and up- and download your files. Great free service.
I just logged in (I use the account about once a month) and its true, my account usage is 1% of 2000MB.
Time to fill it up with something uncompressable and see if it really is 2Gb.....
A few weeks ago they said they were going to up their storage to 250MB. Now they say they're going to up it to 2GB. Guess how much space there is now. 2 lousy megs. I'll believe they're giving 2GB mailboxes when I see it.
you have to pay for this :P 19.99 euro/year for this 2GB baby. And 'this' being Hotmail Plus.
Since you are posting on /. your girlfriend problem must be hypothetical.
http://www.fastmail.fm
And they offer a really excellent service too! Secured IMAP, webmail, domain aliases...
No, I don't have shares, but yes, I am a customer!
Rob.
Send me an Gmail invite, and maybe I'd agree and mod you up!
I want a Trillion bits of storage! (*pinky to corner of mouth*)
And a frigg'n shark with a lazer!
Funny thing is, while my Yahoo! Email account provides me with 100MB of storage space, my geocities account still gives me 15MB. I don't get the logic behind it. I wonder how long before Google starts providing hosting for free, like Geocities, but with a LOT more storage space.
The benefit of GMail isn't the raw space, it's the searching tool. I filter several accounts into my account purely so that I can pluck what I need at a moment's notice.
Is it just me or does this just show that Microsoft is missing the point. Yes, it's nice that they will offer 2GB, but honestly, who cares whether you have 1GB or whether you have 2GB? The real advantage is Gmail's interface. Furthermore, Google said Gmail would have 1GB mailboxes and it did. Microsoft said weeks ago that they would increase the mailbox size to 250MB and now has upped that to 2GB. Guess what though, all mailboxes are still 2MB!! 1,000 real MB is more useful than 1,998 phantom megs.
...but it seems like they would also need to add some features to compete with Gmail. I mean, it's not like a lot of people will even get above the 1 GB limit for a while. (Or so I hope.)
Now I can save all those email's promising coupons for viagra
Dear Hotmail Users,
I.O.U. 1,998 Megabytes.
Sincerely,
William H. Gates
Hotmail is possibly the worst of the major email providers right now. Which other email provider occasionally gives you the message "service unavailable, try again later"? I started moving away from hotmail after the time I desperately needed to get to an email and it would continuously give me this message. My other peeve with Hotmail is that the junk mail folder counts towards the measly 2MB, so most of the time my mailbox is overflowing. Even if they give 2GB of space (when they do give it), I'm still moving away from them. Yahoo and GMail are definitely better alternatives.
No need to worry about Hotmail going down. Hotmail runs under BSD. Where do you want to store 2Gb today?
It's all in German!
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Even MORE room for all of the microsoft ads and spam! Gee, what will I ever do without them? I use my hotmail account as a catchall for places (read: nosey websites) I wouldn't trust with my real email address. I don't fill that pithy 2MB often, and when I do, simply deleting the mandatory Microsoft stuff is fine. GMail doesn't intrude much, is easy to use/organize, and is simply superior. MS could offer a terabyte of email for all I care. I'm not so much as batting an eye.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
I think adding more space is missing the point.
Improving the user interface, fulfilling promisses to the userbase, and making the process of web-email more straightforward should be their focus. Not supersizing their accounts.
Taking a look at the hotmail site, I am reminded of college bulletin boards where advertisements and flyers are stapled to the wall haphazardly, each trying to grab your attention when all you really wanted to find was that note your friend left you on the board.
Google's Gmail is the information frontdesk at a five star hotel where you walk by, ask if you have any messages, and get on with your life.
If MS/Hotmail is just throwing space/money at the problem, then they are missing the point entirely and will just be wasting money. Not that that's stopped them before or that that seems to matter to them much.
Winged Power Photography
google goes public yesterday
microsoft announces 2 gig email today
sounds to me like someone is trying to lower the others stock prices....
I cant see it, says "Database problem" !
-- Mskadu (Blogs: http://mskadu.blogspot.com/ and http://mytechieself.blogspot.com/)
Not to mention gmail is just a beta test now & google can pull out of it whenever they want without too much moaning from users, whereas if bigger places like yahoo, hotmail ..increase their services & then retract (ie. cause google closes gmail for reason xyz) they'll have way more ppl moaning :)
..coldwar sabotage anyone?
Not to mention all the bigger places where more thinking about how to make money off their services (since they where loosing money) until gmail came along & blew their subscription plans.
Also all the bigger places will have to fork out way more $$ to up their services (since higher user base) than google
But Microsoft have of course completely missed the point - it sure is nice to have a lot of storage space, but where GMail really wins is in ease of use and speediness of the site...
wow - the more storage they give us the more space we'll have to keep our spam!
Who needs to buy the stuff to may things bigger now?
My only beef with hotmail is that I had an hotmail account before Microsoft bought the server and I've not been able to log into it since... Grrr!
You are correct that it classifies most spam as spam and puts it in the "Junk Mail" folder.
Unfortunately, the Junk Mail folder counts against your storage allowance, so for me it is almost as bad as not filtering it at all. Also, I guess I have one of those easily guessed user names, so I get a lot of spam.
I could allow "Contacts Only", but then everything that isn't a contact goes to junk mail, and a lot of mail that isn't spam (but also isn't from a contact) goes to junk mail, and again, it is just like not having a spam filter.
And the interface does suck
I'm sorry you read this as a knee-jerk anti-MS rant, I think I am looking at this fairly objectively. BTW, I have had a Hotmail account since long before MS bought it.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
You can't open a message into another tab/window, neither in hotmail nor in gmail. What's left is to copy and paste the same URL to another window but hey... Well, at least Google is working on an plain HTML Interface instead of their IMHO crappy dhtml interface.
Can't mod in a thread you've posted in.
i got 250MB in my hotmail inbox RIGHT NOW
if you email me or something i'll mail you a screenshot
cheers
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Unfortunately, it doesn't work right now (and maybe it will be
Cheers
The biggest advantage of gmail is the possibility of searching for email without having to manually sort it, and it is just that which makes the 1GB of storage attractive and useful. *If* hotmail go with the 2GB, I'd be curious to see what else they'll change to allow people to make any use of this available storage.
Hotmail is unusable anyway as long as it only supports receiving mails in ISO-8859-1. It silently ignores the charset defined in the mail headers.
:)
2gb is nice though. But I already have a real mail server with ~10GB storage
Erik Dalén
I just logged into my Hotmail account directly (I rarely do this any more, thanks to this), and found that my mail limit was upped from a paltry 1MB to a whopping 2MB!
Seems like there is a kind of "reverse FUD" thing going on here...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
GMX, a German ISP and free e-mail service, is offering 1GB for free. Bump that to 5GB for 3 EUR/month or 10GB for 5 EUR/month.
However the fun doesn't end here, as they also offer automatic POP/IMAP e-mail retrieval, custom filters for automatic redirection, SMS/MMS alerts, up to 15 aliases...
Oh, and did I mention you can use your capacity as an iDisk-like network disk and share your files with other GMX members? I think they even have a Windows plug-in to mount your storage account as a network drive in the Explorer.
Alas, AFAIK it's in German only. I for one, welcome our new German overlords...
Wow, 2GB spam!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Hotmail has graphic ads? I don't see any.
Maybe one of these days Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc, will figure out that its not the space, its the search and organization facilities.
I own a server. My server has dual 120 gig hard drives. I can have dozens of times more space than Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc, offers by using a server I already own. But I still use Gmail because I can't duplicate their searching and cataloging abilities. And until Gmail's [laughter]competitors[/laughter] can offer that same capability, I'm not even the slightest bit interested in their offers at any price, even free.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My passport login is my gmail address :D
Make that up to 10GB for 4.99 EUR (or 5GB for 2.99 EUR). Even the free 1GB accounts include the WebDAV accessible "MediaCenter", in case you want to fill up the space with pictures, songs and other files, which you can then share with other GMX users.
2. Dynamic DNS service on your IP address from your ISP.
3. Procmail & fetchmail grabbing mail from the ISP mail server.
4. Strong firewall rules & SSH-only access with public & private keys.
5. Carry around your private key with Putty on a USB memory stick and / or a floppy disk.
I have 160GB of storage and can get to my email form just about any PC in the world. Plus I haven't got to worry about "yet another email account".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I traced the story to theinquirer.net/?article=17949 and there is no utterence as to the validity of the story.
/.
This may be a way of theinquirer.net getting some advertising out of
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
The big plus to hotmail over gmail right now if that hotmail supports rich clients. You can use it without ads and with full offline support through Outlook or Outlook Express. Try pulling out the cable and reading your Gmail. That and you can actually get a gmail account without groveling or buying one on ebay. Incidentally, I did get one a few weeks ago but am already relegated to a really long login name that isn't firstname.lastname because every permutation was already used up!
5. List on NASDAQ
6. Profit!
I wonder how they'll work around the 2G limit this time, as it's always been a pain for them. Disk partitions, files, AVI's, now mailbox.
doesn't really excite me.
what i really want is attachments over 10Mb...
so why would I use it, instead of gmail's excellent UI and labels. for mailing lists and discussion groups, the threading is awesome.
Does anyone noticed that prices reduced for Yahoo biz mail http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/bzinfo/prod/bemail/ compare_mail_packages.php and Yahoo web hosting http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/bzinfo/prod/wh/comp are.php, which includes tons of space ($11.99 pm == 25 EMAIL ID [ 2 GB each], 2 GB hosting space, and other stuff). Wow they are ahead of every one
Many services now crossing 1 gig mark, (http://fearside.org/~vivekgite/gmail-watch/ look right side Bigger the better - MailBox); EAST or WEST gmail is best of free email, but for "Small Business" yahoo rocks.
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
So this is just a reaction to Yahoo!s already available 1GB of storage for subs.
Yahoo IMHO is one of the better email providers right now. I see little point in penis length comparison between Yahoo! and GMail, except for lack of ads (which doesn't bother me so much, sometimes colourful is nice... I don't think the extra Kb's are killing my connection)
Google is a clean interface, and searching etc. I don't search my emails - I really think people should realise that email is not a storage format, and you should increase the signal:noise by extracting pertinent information into a real format.
URLs: FireFox Browser Bookmarks
Emails: Thunderbird Contacts
Events: Sunbird Calendar
Tasks: SunBird again? I use Rainlendar but SunBird seems to do a tasty job.
Tell me that GMail search is better than using real tools with real semantic data - it just isn't.
Internet search is tricky. Your own searching is harder because you *know* what you want, you have to find it, not a reference to it, or something relevant to it.
Email has two components, communication and documents. Communcation can contain document information - like a rough draft, which you can copy paste into a word processor. [OpenOffice].
Documents again should be stored in a file system, not a POP3 or IMAP (or web interface) system. it should allow for collaboration and permissions and backups. (and saving back to the document).
Communication contains triggers such as 'Do this' or 'Here is my sexy pic'
You should either: create a task (or remember it) or save the jpg into your private folder, or a USB drive...
Then delete the email. Email is like a file transfer/IM bastard child that never goes away, always leaves a ghost 'transfer 100% complete' dialogue and never cleans its logs.
Keep the internet tidy, delete your email.
This has been a public service announcement.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Umm.. For you guys that actually take the time to think, it was an anonymous reader writing in with zero references, zero credibility and no specific dates given as to when this project will come to fruition, or anything other than conjecture. Why should anyone believe it's true?
... this is a load of crap.
I'm still waiting for my Hotmail inbox to provide consistent access rather than increased storage
I would hate to scandisk and defragment all of that hdd space.
Doesn't anyone out there use regular ISP-provided e-mail anymore? I have all the backup e-mail storage space I want on my own Personal Computer. How many people honestly need instant access to an old e-mail from two years ago from anywhere on the web?
The older people will remember MS promising the sky to stop people from adopting OS/2 and the younger can look to Longhorn. Not even close to release yet and it is already being stripped and things MS promised to be in XP but really where in Longhorn are now definitly going to be in "who cares". WinFS anyone? How long has MS been promising a better filesystem?
This little announcement grabbed MS a few headlines. None of the media will be coming back to MS in a few weeks and ask them why they haven't delivered. Journalists ain't even smart enough to question goverments on breaking campaign promises. Far easier to copy paste the next press release.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm sure Gmail will be very grateful.
Just checked my pam ridden hotmail account that I've had since before M$ bought it and they're actually offering 250MB to freeloaders. The 2GB is for paying customers.
:P
Yay! 250MB of SPAM to delete every day!
"Gmail looks like it might become popular!"
"Oh, that's no problem. Gmail's got 1GB, we'll respond in kind and give all those bastards TWICE as much!"
"Wow, Johnny, if 1GB is good, imagine how neato 2GB would be!"
Talk about linear thought. Google does something new, so Hotmail's solution is to replicate that something new + 1 (except entirely without the newness). And of course they leave out in their plans all the things more complicated for committees to understand, like Gmail's improved usability. "Google has 1GB!" is probably as much they could grasp of the situation, because it's certainly all they've responded to.
"1 Gig should be enough for anyone!"
I love it. Google pilot a big-box email beta system, and we all get 2Gb Hotmail.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Google of Sherwood.
I don't
It may be 2GB but it's still Hotmail.
Gmail is far cooler and the layout is the best web based one i've ever seen. Hotmail is slow and crappy, gmail is fast and lovely.
I don't care if Hotmail does 100GB, i'll stick with my Gmail.
What's the big deal with web-based mail? It is slow, ineffective and you are lucky if you get a decent handle. (mailto:isyewf656@hotmail.com). IMAP rules all the way.
J.
Somebody put together an SMTP based file system please!
Gotmail stopped working sometime in february and hasn't been updated since last year.
The "coming soon" sometime in autumn promised freebie option for standard Hotmail will be 250mb, 10mb per e-mail.
http://www.imagine-msn.com/hotmail/en-us/
NOT!
This is the second time that Microsoft has made grandiose announcements about how much space they will give away for free, but nothing has really changed - Yahoo stepped up to the plate immediately and gave everyone 100 MB.
Let's look at that more closely; Yahoo said they were going to give everyone 100 MB, then they did it. Microsoft has promised always promised the moon but we're all still waiting.
Why put up with it? Try out Yahoo mail - it's really really good, and it's really really 100 MB. Right now. Not tomorrow, or "soon", now.
Why does anyone, let along
This just goes to show what technology and services can be offered in the presence of competition, which would not have been provided with the absence of competition. Now, we can only imagine where the world would be if Microsoft had competition in the OS market.
The moronic Slashdot editors strike again. When did you wakeup. Hotmail did this WEEKS ago....welcome to the real world you doodoo heads.
Nothing to see hear except a bunch of dopey editors.
"Innovation" strikes again.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Hotmail is big, fat, slow and bloated i only use it because i still get emails there, my 2MB of space is always full and waiting for it all to load if im on a slow connection or pc is just torture. Gmail is super fast, efficiently designed and a pleasure to use. Hotmail could offer 100GB and Gmail would still be in the hearts of many, even so with all the money going into google right now they could probably keep their space higher than Hotmails for a long time..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
>1 GB will more than suit 97% of the webmail users out there.
Dude,
640k ought to be enough..
Not against you btw, this brute force attempt by hotmail cracks me up. They deleted my valuable folders some time ago and I am kinda pissed. Except that I need my passport for the msn people, i don't logon much anymore.
-bron
... a penile enhancement product the truly performs wonders,
... a former minister of a third world company who really needs my help moving millions out of his country,
... a home mortgage rate that is too good to be found at my bank,
... prescription Viagra for next to nothing,
... singles in my area who will put out on the first date for a coke and hamburger,
... and all of the amazing products that are too revolutionary to find except through unsolicited electronic communications.
By the sound of things here Hotmail is still in the process of doing the 250MB upgrades.
I had been waiting on mine forever, but it jumped up to 250 ~a week ago, or so.
I'll still use gmail 98% of the time, but it's nice to know they won't delete my legacy account if i get in the 2MB range.
About the upgrades, i'm not sure how/if they sort the process, but i've been a user since back in the HoTMaiL days.
Is 2GB of space really much use for email? 2GB webspace would be more useful to most people, although it would be abused by many for mp3s, videos etc..
Do people really need 2GB of funny/sick/naughty videos?
Should be just about enough to cope with the amount of spam Hotmail accounts recieve!
Just checked my hotmail and the 250MB seemed to kick in while I was using it!
OR
(b) sex with a mare ?Which other email provider occasionally gives you the message "service unavailable, try again later"?
Well, GMail, sometimes. But it's still good enough that I don't care :)
Google is a clean interface, and searching etc. I don't search my emails - I really think people should realise that email is not a storage format, and you should increase the signal:noise by extracting pertinent information into a real format.
l y&threshold=2&commentsort=0&tid=95&mode=nested&pid =10020897
URLs: FireFox Browser Bookmarks
Emails: Thunderbird Contacts
Events: Sunbird Calendar
Tasks: SunBird again? I use Rainlendar but SunBird seems to do a tasty job.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118658&op=Rep
As far as storage levels go:
I think maybe I am agreeing, I just feel the need to alaborate, and I am pretty drunk so dont take it to seriously.
I dont think either expect most users to use this storage so its just a marketing game. Put in big disk arrays, calculate for 1/100th usage, profit!
You dont honestly believe that they alocated 2GB just for your sorry ass do you?
Oh wait, this is possibly google I am talking about, we cannot knock them. Of course they have my 2GB waiting for me as soon as I subscribe. IMAP,FTP,HTTP as far as the eye can see. Is this still just web based? Crap, now we have to build a google/hotmail network filesystem to leverage my personal 2GB.
The point is we see 2GB and a war going on. The general public (which they both cater to) sees higher numbers that they will never use, it just seems better. This becomes a numbers game and it will get far better before they are done.
In genereal its a good thing when someone releases some retrictions, so in in general its a good thing. I wonder though, do the some 50% windows servers that hotmail runs on, do they count that high? Or is this just a bluff...
Next up: Google OS based on Debian, optimized for crawling!
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
They got DoubleSpace installed on Hotmail servers! They just lack a bit conventional memory, thats all...
Phear MS technology you Google!
Can someone please tell me why on earth you need 1 GB or 2 GB of storage space?
I've had a hotmail account for about 7 years now and I have never had it get more than 20% full. If I'm subscribed to lists I delete the emails after I read/reply.
If I say oh darn, I want that info again I generally know where the archive can be found & searched.
What are people storing in email that is so huge. With attachments limited in size to 10MB it doesn't seem like an effective storage for software etc. I simply cannot fathom; someone care to shed some light? Is it every joke/humor email they've received stored away; what, what, what? I feel like I'm missing out hehe.
if anyone wants a gmail account one is up for grabs at gmail@mailinator.com
- Qua
Excellent! MS are giving me, er, are going to give me, more email space :)
Combined with that great new file system that Microsoft gave, er, says that they are going to give me, my computing experience will be fantastic! Real soon now!
Take that, you smug GMail and Linux users; sure, you're laughing now, but just wait, I'll have the last laugh, um, real soon now ...
I've been using GMX for years, and literally had no problems. Even when they switched to the all-German interface, I manage to make my way around (had a little German in high school). But I can't remember the last time I had a problem with it. Softhome also has similar decent service, but not quite as good, nor as reliable.
I use it to sign into Ebay when I've forgotten which user-id/password combo I used when I signed up.
My Journal
Gmail is certainly not all about storage. It's about the Search, Labels, Conversation, and lightning-fast interface leveraging that storage space that lets me manage my email in ways I never could before. I have yet to find a (free) Web-based email service offers the speed and flexibility in managing my emails that Gmail does. I have emails dating back to 1998, and Gmail lets me find the information I need quickly. And Gmail's ads are non-intrusive and often useful. Hotmail could provide a terabyte of storage, but the intrusive, flashy ads make the experience nothing short of annoying. Even if Gamil charged for their service, I'd pay for it because of its functionality. It truely is in "the Google way".
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Precisely. You can think about it like this:
Disk space is cheap. When you give users 2GB of disk space, they don't really use it all up. The disk space is not pre-allocated and immediately consumed. Thus, 2GB is really more about users' perception of Hotmail's offering, and this positive perception comes at a low price (again: disk space is cheap)
On the other hand, it costs a lot to pay a few dozen developers to add valuable, innovative new features, such as GMail's labels.
It also costs a lot of money to market Hotmail, to evangelize and to hype it, which is what people are doing with/for GMail for 'free'.
In conclusion, it's easy and not that expensive to just throw 'we offer 2GB' on the site, but it is expensive to add features and market the service.
Simpy
... am I the only one? Maybe they're doing it in order of seniority, since I've had Hotmail since early 1997 ...
Hmm, that's funny, I used it yesterday.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Are the storage companies. I know that space is probably allocated on the fly, but the HPs and EMCs must be licking their chops. I don't consider myself a heavy email user, and I'm already approaching 10% GMail capacity.
Even if Gmail charged for their service, I'd pay for it because of its functionality.
Quiet, you fool! ;)
Wow 2Gb of spam!! Dear Mrs. Moboumi and Brenda Jones You can send me more phising mails and spam now. thanks Hotmail.
Indeed, I've had an account there since the time they had multinational interfaces. Since they upped the accounts to 1GB, I have no real reason to switch to gmail. I haven't checked (and most of the website docs are out of date now), what size are messages limited to now?
/. acct
AC because I don't remember my
Yes, .Mac comes with 100MB of online storage, but you can only use 15 of that for mail.
.Mac account that cost me 13,900 yen per year and unless they up that to at *least* 1GB by renewal time, I won't be renewing.
.mac account is up for renewal soon and I don't think I'll be renewing it. .mov or .mp3 that I create. I tend to feel resentful when I get that "over quota" message on my email, when I have paid for other storage that I cannot use as I like.
I have a
Yes, it includes other things, like a virus checker. WTF?
I don't need a WebDav server for files - I use Samba over an SSH tunnel to my home server. It's a lot faster and more convenient.
The other things they offer, like game trials and discounts on magazines really strike me as the kind of thing I could get for free if I dug around.
I just wrote them a note to let them know how I feel about it:
Hi.
My
The quality of the service has been great, but simply put, 15MB is too little storage for email.
I have little use for the other 85MB of storage, except for occasionally putting up a
For $99 a year, it really should be something like 5-10GB.
Thanks,
Jim
http://www.wirefarm.com
-- My Weblog.
Or, for that matter, the wonderful 'SEARCH' command supported by good mailservers like Cyrus IMAPd. Server-side keyword-indexed searches through message bodies are all good.
This is old news.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
May be dated, obsolete, your milage may vary, you have been warned.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
According to a times article, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8209- 1224582_2,00.html (stats in the newspaper edition) Yahoo has over 256m email users, google under 1m. It doesn't mention MSN, but the search engine figures speak for themselves: 43% Google, 31% Yahoo, so I imagine the rest is msn, altavista...
I wonder how many users Hotmail has - 100m atleast. Multiply that by 2gb, and that's a huge upgrade.
Nothing costs nothing
I remember the problems that I had accessing my Hotmail account when they tried to swith from BSD to NT the first time. I could not sign on for days or it was very very slow. Then they switched back to BSD. I encountered similiar, but not as serious, problems when they switched to W2K. I wonder what it will be like when they switch from 2MB to 2GB? I really hope that history does not repeat itself.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
LinuxKnight If you do in fact want a gmail invite, let me know via email in my profile. I have a spare you're welcome to play with.
they want their flat-text data formats back.
Nice to see that Hotmail wants to get some press coverage, but I think that hackers agree that Gmail is not about storage space. It's about providing a better email service.
Hotmail can up their storage space, but unless they manage to curb the spam problem (choice between lots of spam or missed emails) and fix their slow interface, Gmail is street lengths ahead of it even though Gmail is ostensibly in alpha stage.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Welcome to the supersized nation. It doesn't matter if it's bad service, just as long as it's BIG!
Hotmail went steeply downhill after MS bought them, and has never recovered. There are better and more respected services out there. Who CARES how much storage they'll give you?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
A while ago they promised free storage of up to 250 MB, and said it would happen at least a week ago. I'm starting to distrust their reliablility.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
What about attatchments? Can i send a big file to myself and then be able to get to it from some other place? 2 Gb would be useful if that was the case but to have that space to store a bunch of spam and not being able to use it for something productive sounds pretty lame.
The biggest problem i encounter when dealing with other peoples mail is that i cant send any big attachments.
So, how big mail can Gmail or hotmail deliver?
HTTP/1.1 400
As a .Mac subscriber, I'm beginning to wonder how useful my $100/year subscription really is. And before everyone writes back to tell me of all the other features, yes, I know they're there; I just don't tend to use them.
Really, all I use is the email. I can access it via Pop/IMAP rather than just webmail, which I quite like, but that 15MB is starting to look smaller by the day!
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
You have to pay to get Hotmail plus. It's not free (like gmail).
"Get MSN® Hotmail® Plus for only 19.99/year"
it's a subscription service, and it's cheaper to buy your 2GB for you PC than to rent it from hotmail.
T.
Yeah, all these articles are wrong, the story needs to be updated! You have to pay $20 a year for the 2GB of email storage.
They offer free POP3 and IMAP email with unlimited storage. They start with 40MB mailbox, but as soon as you have less than 10MB left, you can push a button on a web-interface and add another 40. Rince, repeat.
Bad news for those too lazy to learn Russian: Engish inteface is rather skimpy. http://www.hotbox.ru/
People are complaining about when this is going to happen. Maybe they're doing this in waves or something, but I've had my hotmail plus service for 3 years now (yes, okay, I admit it, MS leechs 20 bucks a year from me, but thats all I swear! ^_^)
But they told me about the upgrade at the begining of the summer, they sent out an email telling me about this way back in June! Anyway, I'm telling ya, my email account has been upgraded to the 2GB of stoarge for TWO weeks already.
(On a side note, I went from 90% full on my old 10MB account to now it reads "less then 1% FULL".)
Don't encourage microsoft hotmail, unless you like all the email you get to be html formatted so they can include stupid backgrounds and pretty fonts.
Meh.
two billion spams of that...
Oh well, what the hell...
Hmmm, can I tar all my data and e-mail it to my Hotmail account as a backup store?
Oh well, what the hell...
I have Rogers ISP in Toronto and you get a 2GB Yahoo email with the service. So technically, not free but...
I think Sympatico is getting in bed with Hotmail but I don't know the details.
Both Google and Microsoft are offering free email with lots of storage. Google is going to pay for its service by delivering targeted ads, based on examination of your email contents.
People appear to trust Google with that information, largely because Google has a reputation for "not doing evil". They had the opportunity to deliver skewed search results for short-term profit, and didn't take it.
Microsoft can't offer a similar service, largely because nobody would trust them with that information. Microsoft has a reputation that's basically the opposite of Google - market share first, profit second, ethics when it doesn't conflict with either of those (say - The Three Laws of Microsoft?).
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
There's a great service called mail2web that will allow you to access any pop3 via the web. Of course, that means you have to trust them not to read your email, so it's probably not good for a privacy freak, but they wouldn't use webmail anyway, would they?
Except, with hotmail you know that 1.5 GB of that 2 GB (at least) will be taken up by spam. Not worth it to have a hotmail account, no matter what the storage capacity. I've had good luck with the 100 MB Yahoo mail to use for transfering largish files, but will prolly go Google once its available for the masses.
Microsoft software is garbage, and I'll prove it.
The Microsoft Corp. is a collection of liars, thieves, and cheaters who's only motivation is money. They could care less about the safety and security of the people who use their software.
Here are a few links to help you see the truth:
The US government is telling people to stop using Microsoft's software.
Microsoft has lied and got caught trying to fake evidence in court, and they lie to people about TCO (total Cost of Ownership) statistics.
The Microsoft Windows operating system is dangerous for eveyone.
Using Microsoft software is a bad idea for people and the internet as a whole. Don't believe me? Click the above links and read the articles for yourself.
How much more proof do you need to throw Microsoft Windows, and other MS software, in the garbage and switch to Linux?
I wouldn't call reading e-mail with Outlook a BIG plus.
Can I use mozilla/any other mail client to read my Hotmail account offline??
What power has law where only money rules.
2 gigs is at the point where 99.9% of your customers will never use this much space, why not offer UNLIMITED! space, and only restrict daily data transfer, space costs these places nothing, but transfering emails does. Unlimited space, and up to 100 mb email transfer a day.
TruePunk | Games
I see a lot of posts here saying that MS missed the point of GMail. Doesn't everyone realize that the very definition of "the point" is "something MS missed?"
Do not touch -Willie
I don't care if they gave me 20GB - Hotmail blows! Their interface is retarded and I keep getting those stupid emails from Hotmail Staff. In addition, Hotmail - much like IE - has long lagged behind other providers in the number and quality of features provided. So until they get their act together it's Yahoo and Google for me.
...but where Hotmail really kicks ass is in its spam filtering. It works so well, even much of my legitimate email is auto-deleted.
-- dR.fuZZo
... ought to be enough for everyone.
I think the real problem is getting messages there. I know that it is intended to allow users to keep all of their old emails, but it would be nice to send and receive larger emails too. I know that for me, anything over 15-20Mb can't be send without the 'whoops' message from gmail and most other emails servers won't let emails with a size larger than 10Mb anywhere near the outgoing queue. Can you say 'bounced'.
As any Hotmail user knows, Hotmail has this mysterious magical ability to fill up with spam the very millisecond you sign up for an account.
That doesn't happen to Gmail.
I believe I speak for many when I say
"Good try, Bill."
Is it just me or are sites written in PHP always either down or obnoxiously slow? Why don't we have a slashdot article to yap about that. It really stinks because cool sites are usually owned by cheap people who use PHP.
Disks in my area can be had for as little as 25 cents per gigabyte. Presuming a user actually uses the full two gigs, ad revenues would probably pay the $0.50 in a short time.
The big advantage to me is that I can get a hotmail account or two right now - I can't get a Gmail account. And that's the same for 1000's of other users.
So right now, a 2Mb free hotmail account is much more atractive to me than a 1Gb but-you-can't have-one-yet Gmail account !
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
httpmail plugin for Mac OS X's Mail.
Dunno about other platforms, but it's open source, so the chances are good.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Holy spamburger! Instead of getting 2 Megabytes worth of spam, now I can get 2 Gigabytes of spam! Yay for me.
No one else has commented on this, but my 2MB account was recently upgraded to 250MB.
I'm not sure how they choosing who to upgrade. I've had the account long before MS bought them, and am constantly at the 2MB limit.
My account has been this way for about a week or two. Has this happened to anyone else?
They must be upgrading accounts in batches or something. My account has been at 250 meg for a week or two now. I'd give gmail a try, but no invite... Course someone could send me one at lbeckm3@hotmail.com if they so desired!!
My Hotmail account that I have had for years just got upgraded to 250mb a few days ago.
Dear Hotmail Users,
I don't know what you're complaining about, 640k should be enough for anybody.
Sincerely,
William H. Gates
in bed.
Over two months ago I read a story saying that Hotmail would up it's storage from 2meg to 200meg, and I'm still waiting for that.
So I'll believe this only when I see it.
THINK! It's patriotic
Stop visiting sites made by your next door neighbour's 12 year old son.
M$ is full of crap. They said they would increase the storage limit, and now they are saying it again. Hotmail is STILL at 2mb.
I use the WWW::Hotmail perl module to forward my email to Google Mail anyway. So in a sense, I do have 1gig of space with hotmail.
-Xantus
I've decided I'm giong to use /. as my Email. All I have to do is post in a consistent place (say first story of the day) and use a bozotic keyword to search for (i.e. slashmail). /. , so maybe noone will understand it ;)
The only problem is that everyone can see the nasty notes my g/f and I exchange...but this is
Try FastMail instead. The Guest level account was enough for me (it's certainly far better than Hotmail!) but I upgraded to Member and now Full is starting to look pretty good.
600MB of storage for $20 a year. Also, 20MB of public/private file storage, and the sweet subdomain addressing feature (which has managed to keep me spam-free for two years!)
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
/. claimed another victim osviews.com:
We're just too dern'd popular these days...
We've had to take the site offline for some maintinence.
Please bear with us and come back soon.
---
Those who can, do
Those who can't, teach
Those who don't know how, supervise
But you would have to ask why, as a paid subscription service, they offer 10% of the storage of gMail.
That's not fair. Apple has been offering the e-mail service since it was iTools pre-OSX. Back then there WAS no gmail. Back then 10MB was a decent e-mail service. Of course if you want apple to bump up the space that's arguable but to go around wondering why on earth they ahve such a small space in comparison to Gmail. That's just not thinking clearly
I'm an e-mail packrat. I have about 5 years worth of e-mail and attachments saved, and it totals maybe 70MB. These storage wars are not differentiated from checkbox feature wars in video cards. Except maybe the latter results in something useful over time.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
Hmm. Your comment made me think, someone should write a P2P file sharing app that keeps all the slices of the files as specifical serialnumber'd (subject line?) attachments on emails stored on hundreds of free email accounts.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Just logged in.. not surprised, but my limit is now 250MB.
It was internal only, but hackers at securityoffice.net leaked it. I have a mirror here, please mirror it yourselves and don't slashdot my server!
I stopped using hotmail years ago due to loads of spam coming in and one month expiration interval, I had multiple email accounts for different uses, friends, family, domain registrations, etc. and if you don't use hotmail (unpaid version) for a month, they delete all your email and make the account inactive. I switched to yahoo that had a much longer inactivation period and 50 times better spam blocking. Eventually I switched to Gmail... I would never use hotmail unless they guarantee inactivation period to be 12 months instead of 1 (and give me a free gift certificate to amazon.com!!) . I think Gmail had that period set to 9 months...
All my emails that I explictly checked to save in the sent folder got deleted because of a change in policy on hotmail to start deleting old emails for "my benefit". I do not trust hotmail after that and have used my account as a spam address.
Another clueless individual who spouts the "Disk Space Is Cheap" mantra without real knowledge of back-end usage.
IDE disk space may be cheap, but it is utterly worthless in a multiuser, multidisk, multi-access environment. SCSI and Fiberchannel RAID or SANS arrays are whats needed by any company worth its salt. Needless to say, the RAID and SANS are an order more expensive for the needed performance. Software and IDE RAIDs are not fast enough when you talk about the numbers of users that Google and Hotmail have to support.
As for Google's search engine technology, that's a different matter entirely. They need CPU cycles and RAM as well as disk, so clustering machines with a single IDE disk or single disk per IDE channel is sufficient for their task. When you have 50 users or even 5 users simultaneously accessing that 250 GB IDE disk, you'll be left waiting for your data. Even if it's a 40 GB drive with 2 users, you'll notice a delay. IDE is just not scalable.
Hotmail works just fine with Firefox, as well.
Can I get those 2 gigs in FTP format instead of email format?
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
I imagine they'll be upgrading them by cluster. The accounts are spread out over clusters of db hosts. It wouldn't make any sense to add users to machines until they're full and then start provisioning onto the next machine. It should all appear random to end users. I can't imagine how much work is going into this by the guys who run the datacenters that hotmail runs out of. This is a large increase of either disk size in the arrays or number of db nodes. Either way, someone has put in a lot of OT on this lately (yeah, I know they don't get paid overtime). Glad I'm not involved with this one.
I could tell you more, but then I'd have to kill myself.
Too bad their "hugely improved" interface doesn't work with Opera, Links, Dillo, older versions of Mozilla, and countless other browsers.
That's true. One of the big problems these days is there's only so much you can do with plain jane HTML. Gmail's interface "experience" depends heavily on javascript. And they've done a good job of trying to support as many modern browsers as possible. Mozilla, Firefox, IE, and Safari all work flawlessly. And those are the main browsers on the "main three" operating systems: Windows (IE), Mac (Safari), and Linux (Mozilla/Firefox). This probably accounts for 98-99% of all users out there. That's pretty damn good if you ask me.
I haven touched Opera since the 6.0 days, one hte reasons I stopped using it was because their javascript support was horrible. Personally I dont like web sites that depend on javascript, however Gmail is really the first one where I can understand the use of it. It makes it feel much more like an actual application on your desktop as opposed to the standard webmail interface. A lot of sites that depend heavily on javascript are dependent on it in a stupid way, eg 99% of them could get by without it. With Gmail I feel differently however.
If they wanted to support all browsers, including old outdated ones and ones that didnt support javascript well or at all, it would have come at a huge cost to the interface experience. It would just be another yahoo or hotmail account. And if that was the case, the only difference between gmail and the others would have been their storage size, which now most of the others have matched or exceeded, so there would be no advantage at all. Which would have made Gmail totally pointless.
Joseph?
Great! When my Google account fills with spam I can switch to Hotmail! I currently forward all the spam from my Mail server to my gmail account so I can search through it all to look for real email. I currently use up 26% of the 1 GB available in 9024 messages! I figure I have 111 days to figure out what to do then / see what gmail does when I reach the limit. The Google search function is great to look through rafts of spam!
Mind you, I am careful with my info and I have only received one actual spam to my Gmail account in that time. And yes, it was correctly tagged.
Storage is not everything, as evidenced by the other post today about the GMail watcher Klip.
Want to monitor your Hotmail account without loggin in over and over again?
Check out the Hotmail Klip from Serence, it's bundled with KlipFolio 2.6, a free Windows tool that can monitor remote sites for changes so you don't have too. The Hotmail Klip shows you your message body as well, which is more than Outlook does.
You can download it here at Serence's site.
You can see some screen shots here.
(I'm not a coward, it's just too late in the day to create yet another on-line account.)
... I still wouldn't go back to spam^H^H^H^Hhotmail. Not ever since Micro$oft bought hotmail and took away every single useful feature one by one. Back in 1997, things like auto-forwarding emails and POP3 used to be freely available. There was no time limit set on how often you had to check your account either. Heck, I was away from the Internet for nearly 4 months, and my account still existed. There was even a time when it didn't require cookies. Ah the good old days....
Then one day I logged in to find all my Sent messages had been wiped out. There were over 300 of them, all used to keep track of things. That was the final straw. I had already switched to the far superior Yahoo and will never ever go back to hotmail.
For those feeling nostalgic, I found an old page of what Hotmail used to look like. (Disable Javascript first to get rid of that annoying geocities garbage.) Too bad I can't log in or anything.
I had several hotmail accounts, I used them faithfully. I put up with the small size because I had a history with the accounts, and some people could only get ahold of me through them.
Then Hotmail came out with their "Sign in every 30 days or we'll turf you." I kept up my normal routine, and then I had a busy travel month, didn't sign in, and all my accounts died. I didn't bother reactivating them. As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to take an active, frequently-used account, that has been active and frequently used for years, and turf it because I don't sign in for 30 days, then you don't want my eyeballs on your banners. I could understand turfing after 3 months, or even 6, but 30 days cuts it a little tight for those of us who don't have it as a primary account.
So, no more hotmail. I still have my original RocketMail account, opened circa 1994, and even though it was bought out by Yahoo! years ago, it still works like a charm. I have my ISP accounts, and I just recently got a GMail account because it's ubernifty... and, frankly, I don't miss Hotmail at all, and "Sorry, we fucked up!" just won't cut it. Maybe with a brick-and-mortar business, but on the CAPITAL-I Internet, those who fuck up become the next "Hey, do you remember...?"
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
That's all fine and dandy but I'm still waiting for my first gig Microsoft promissed two months ago. Since they just decieded to offer 2 gb now that is pretty good evidence that they havn't even started trying to upgrade the service yet.. This is obviously just marketing hype to try to take some steam out of Gmail. This is so similar to any other tech field competition like the graphic card and CPU card industry for example... Always paper releases no products till 2-3 months down the line from the "offical release"
I've heard this before, but I don't believe it.
Will they actually do it? When?
My hotmail mailbox is still a whopping 2 MBytes.
-- br
Why is it that my "2MB" Hotmail account claims to be 75% full when I have 0.75MB of mail stored (I know this because I have had pretty much the same messages in there as I did before the upgrade to 2MB)?
I think they are just going to lie about it. Like they do with everything else.
In any case, I would like to see this tested when they unveil it (like Kevin Rose did with Gmail).
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Great, great, that's all fine and dandy, but where's the source for this information? Just some more "professional" /.-accepted journalism, I guess.
Moreover, Hotmail doesn't even begin to compete with gmail as far as the interface, searchability options, multiple labels, &c go.
Nice try, MS.
--A witty sig proves nothing.--
http://www.imagine-msn.com/hotmail/en-ww/upgrade.a spx
I seems to me that this hotmail announcment states that the 2Gigs of storage are for subscribers only.
So to answer OP's question.... Not that choked....
The facts are that GMail doesn't exist for most users. Google has waited too long between announcing the offering and producing something to be used.
"Invites" aside, the facts are that GMail does NOT yet exist since it is only available to those willing to buy an invite from EBay.
Google previously had the potential advantage of more storage --- and now it doesn't.
E-mail is the single largest traditional offering that a service provider may offer to encourage customer loyalty. Google offering such an advantage quickly may have caused quite a stir. This is because the "old regime" (MSN, Yahoo, AOL) may have to fight for the loyalty that they had won early in the game. This would have caused a lot of market movement and pressure.
Having seen this threat, they have adjusted. There is no longer a reason that a consumer should switch even if the option was actually available --- which it is not.
As a consumer of services, I no longer care about it. Frankly, it isn't worth talking about any longer. GMail is already dead in the water.
OK first of all I am a Level 3 tech at MSN. So this is kind of the official line. MSN/Hotmail is nto plannign on giveing there customers 2gb of mail, Well it is but not for free. MSN has already given them 2gb. As for interface, 9.95 per month they made there own e-mail software (ya it's outlook but built for hotmail accounts) and no I'm not selling it. Won't run on linux anyways. but ya hotmail may suck but hell its' free live with it, it will be 250 mb by January. Signed your friendly MSN guy http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-us&page=hotmail/e s&HL=MSN_Hotmail_Plus&ST=1&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.ms n.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket% 3den-us
Posting anonymously FWIW....
They closed my account for non payment of £1.12
That's more than the $1.00 USD threshold that triggers eBay automated billing system. Owe less than that and the automated billing system won't pester you. This is an example of the binary nature of computing. In eBay's opinion, it would cost too much to process billing for accounts that owe less than $1.00 USD.
PS: Yes, I owe eBay less than $1.00 USD but will pay the next time I try to auction something. Sadly, when money is tight, you must prioritize who gets your meager resources....