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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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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.
Webinterface, POP3/SMTP, server-side filtering and forwarding included.
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
I was playing with my Gmail account and it seems that as long as you rename the file to something other than .rar (or whatever archive type you use) you can upload and retrieve the file just fine. WinRAR allows you to brake up archives into parts, so you make a few dozen 10mb chunks, rename to .xyz and store the file on gmail. Someone will probably make a small program to automate all of this after gmail is available to the general public.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
considering the integration Outlook Express, Entourage et al have with Hotmail, for many people Hotmail *isn't* just "web"-mail.
that said, I'm still waiting for the storage upgrade they promised, up from 2MB to whatever. I was going to retire my hotmail account and go elsewhere, but I decided to wait when they announced. It's starting to sound like what they've been known to do in the past - announce vapourware in order to delay migration/movement to elsewhere.
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 $10 a year, gets the 2GB bump.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
RTFA... misleading /. headings strike again...
Reading the deeper linked article from the top linked article, which is: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17949/ It does not specifically mention the "free" snotmail account gets 2GB.
Reading M$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
The article got it a bit wrong. The free service will be offering only 250mb whereas hotmail plus will give you 2 gig. The free service emails will be limited to 10mb and plus will be 20mb. Still quite far behind Gmail it seems... http://www.imagine-msn.com/hotmail/en-us/
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.
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...
I wouldn't worry about it. I've got gmail, (bgracewood@gmail.com) and to tell the absolute truth, it really is not all that exciting.
The spam filtering is okay. I've had one or two legitimate list emails noted as false positives. Nothing new here.
Forum reply notifications get lumped under one big conversation because Google thinks they are part of a conversation. Err, bzzzzt wrong! Plus the funky javascript preview thing cuts off the most important part of those emails (the link to the forum thread).
The contacts system is an abomination. You can enter a name and an email and some notes. No room for address, phone or anything.
Sure it's a beta, but IMHO it's like a 0.4 rather than a 0.9 version.
gadgetophile.com
it was freebsd actually
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...
Along with the 100MB of storage, it includes hosting, several commercial applications, and several discounts on software and subscription. .mac also lets you access your bookmarks from any computer with internet access.
Albuquerque PC
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.
Hotmail filter spam??! They SEND spam!
I got a hotmail account to use MSN, I have never used it but its full of spam anyway. Expected with hotmail really.
What really pissed me off though was getting an official hotmail message with ads for ING, SEEK, Virgin credit card, some Xbox game, and down the side are instructions for blocking spam: " Ensure you are protected against unsolicited e-mail by setting up your junk e-mail filters. Follow these simple instructions...blah"
What's even more hypocritical is down the bottom of the email it says "As an MSN Hotmail member, you have received this e-mail to inform you of updates, changes to the MSN Hotmail service or special news and information from MSN. Our policy has always been to send e-mail messages only to announce such information, and we'll continue to honor this policy. Thank you for being an MSN Hotmail member."
I would complain to them if it would do any good, but if they were to read all their hate mail they would need a dedicated department for it!
AFAIK, the front end web servers were moved from FreeBSD/Apache to IIS, you're right (See here), but the backend was, and could still be, Solaris. (See parent poster's references.)
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.
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!
of course it is. How else can I read my email when on a course/at a clients site/on holiday?? There are many occasions when it is nice to have email without lugging a damn laptop round with me.
and as for hotmail and gmail just forget them and use yahoo instead, it has 100 Mb of space and so will do for most people (in fact yahoo has always had more space on offer than hotmail (at least in the UK) since I started using it last Millenium!!!) Plus it has good (IMHO) spam filters that work pretty well now I have 'trained' them.
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
Yahoo! Mail has been offering 2GB to their Premium subscribers for the last couple of months.
For the moment, the Gmail size limit per mail is also 10MB, which in practice (encoding) translates to a max 7MB attachment.
I'm using MSN messenger just fine without a hotmail address. I think you're confusing Passport and Hotmail. Passport can use any e-mail and is not restricted to hotmail addresses only.
But I can understand the confusion since they seem linked together, in the sign-up process it is very vague...
Hotmail and Yahoo!'s webmail do.
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 :)
This fall, your MSN e-mail will include:
2GB of storage for your inbox
20MB send/receive attachment size
Now: Web e-mail with no graphical ads!
3. yes there is, I imported all my Outlook address book into Gmail. Look again, it's a new feature (within the last two months).
4. their interface works perfectly under firefox. It is not IE only.
This is a beta service. Except improvements.
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"
Looking at each of your issues seperately:
1. 99 of people wont care.
2. New filters cannot be applied retroactively : This is the first legitimate problem I have found with Gmail. You can do a sample search of your new filter, and then select those email, and then apply label to them (but if you have 100's it is not practical)
3. You can import a variety of existing address books.
4. There's many more problems, including their stupid lack of a plain HTML version I do not agree that their lack of a "plain HTML version" is a problem, gmail functions perfectly in IE and firefox, so I dont see the need for a plain text version. With the natural growth of technology, you have to leave some things behind, and I dont see a need for any plain HTML sites now. As a developer myself, I have not worked with "plain HTML" for 5+ years.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
- The spam filtering is okay. I've had one or two legitimate list emails noted as false positives. Nothing new here.
- the funky javascript preview thing cuts off the most important part of those emails
Google has been tweaking both those features in the past few weeks. I recently noticed a number of mailing lists had been dropped into Spam, even though I had filters set to label them. That isn't happening anymore. And I believe the view message pane has begun showing more of the message w/o having to launch a popup.Annoyances: Bad contacts and filters sorting. No notifications of messages in Spam, filter-labeled messages in Spam are hidden from inbox.
What's nice is that the number of filters is unlimited, versus hotmail's 10, the ability to search your old messages with google's engine, and less obtrusive, even interesting ads.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
More than likely he just does not want to keep anything important on an email system that is in beta status. Granted according to the EULA none of the web email providers are responsible for their systems losing your mail. If I had a gmail account I wouldn't trust it with anything important either. Until its finalized I would treat it as any other piece of beta software, test it as much as possible but don't depend on it for anything.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
Comcast has increased Their email storage size to 250MB, up to 7 email address per subscriber.
Cheap storage VM.
Gmail will have the plain-HTML version done soon. Check out the list of stuff they're working on.
(both links might require a Gmail login)
Native Windows grep
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