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Hotmail Begins to Upgrade Free Accounts
Myrmi writes "It looks as if Hotmail have started to upgrade free Hotmail accounts to 250Mb of space as promised. The account the screenshot is from is an old account - created August 1999 - so I guess they're upgrading the accounts in chronological order. Hopefully they'll get round to newer ones soon."
This will probably be modded troll, but I'm really asking myself, who on earth is using hotmail of all free mail services and why?
At least here in Germany there are several freemail providers that offer at least the same amount of MB and allow me to use pop3 and imap, so why should I care about Hotmail?
I've got an account from 1998 that starts with a and hasn't been upgraded. So it's neither chronological nor alphabetical. It probably just depends on what server your data is stored on when they go to migrate a batch of accounts.
My acct is from '97, and it's still @ 2MB... not sure if they're doing these chronologically, but that's just based on your acct being from '99 vs. mine from '97. Maybe they're going alphabetically? My acct starts w/ an 'f', what does your begin w/ ?
Still, regardless, I've already moved all of my contacts to GMail, and have basically stopped using my Hotmail acct; been planning on letting it die off before the end of the year, once i'm certain that all of my contacts are sending email to my GMail acct.
the spam filters work quite well actually. Go into your options (top right hand corner) click on mail, then junk email protection, then junk email filter and select "enhanced". This adds a junk mail folder and it works pretty well. Sometimes 1 message gets through to my inbox, but it works much better than on the low setting.
this is so preposteous it's amusing. complain all you want about MS business practices, but they are doing a lot to prevent spam, and will likely do more in the future. spam costs them a fortune - far more then they could ever make selling lists to people hawking V!AGr4
hotmail gets spam because it's home to so many addresses that generating messages to random names will get a lot of hits.
Well, I used to run this free email service[1] so I have some insights here.
The service is database-backed, with a normal CGI/mod_perl front end, so you might think that all upgrades would be instantaneous, and for many types of upgrades this is indeed the case.
However, it's not always so straightforward. Firstly, you've got the issue of multiple webservers, which have to be upgraded essentially by hand, and that takes some time.
More seriously, you may need to run scripts to move data around. One example being we used to store the emails themselves in the SQL database, but we soon realised that was a stupid thing to do and we moved to a NFS/IMAP solution for the mail, with the metadata only stored in the database. Because of the sheer volume of data involved we had to migrate each account individually. The strategy we used was to store a "migrated" flag with the user, and when they logged in first time since migration started, we would migrate their email (the process took up to 60 seconds per user depending on the amount of mail they had). In addition, we had a background process running which migrated unmigrated accounts one at a time. The whole process took several weeks to complete.
Another massive migration for us was the original migration of the code from Lotus Notes (true!) to database + mod_perl. This was horrible because it took ages to export the mail from Notes, so we had to maintain essentially two separate systems with a common front end. The custom-designed Apache front end decided whether the user was on the "old" system or the "new" system and redirected requests accordingly. Yuck.
Now I understand that Hotmail isn't the best architected system in the world. Looking at the URLs, it seems to me that each person has a "home" server, and so it's quite possible that sysadmins are now patiently upgrading each server by hand, in the process increasing the storage for that group of users. I don't envy them.
Rich.
[1] Not anymore, so don't blame me for their current failings!
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
This was the main reason that I switched to gmail--it just loads faster.
I noticed this too - it flies compared to Hotmail or Yahoo, but I'm a little worried that the honeymoon will end when it moves from beta and allows millions of more users.
Then again, if anyone can pull it off, it's Google.
The only comment I would make on the Gmail account is that it's hard to list the size of emails and attachments. You have to read the email to see the size of the attachment and there is no size info in the list view. OK, so it's a GB, but it doesn't mean that you won't want to find email to delete after a year or so, especially with large attachments like spreadsheets or pdf's. Right now, I label all the large emails I receive with a 'big' tag so that I can easily find them later.
For middle clicking into a new tab: Get the Hotmail Tabs extension.
for HTML messages with linked texts, clicking on "Content-Type: text/plain" on your message header, with advanced headers enabled(options>mail display settings>message headers>advanced), will open the message in a new window, still within the stupid hotmail frame. but this time around, the links are directed directly to the real URL's, so right clicking on the links>open in new window/tab will send you to that page, sans the frames.
It works like this: you go register for a site, and you use any mailinator.net email. You then go to mailinator, which has already created the account, and login, without even using a password. This is the fastest mail client I have ever seen, the only downfall is that you can't sendmail.
But then again, why would you with a junk account?
There's no solution for now AFAIK.
To you all who are also having this problem: could you please report it on bug 258950? Together we can take out that "worksforme", and if anybody has a clue on what might be happening we'll hopefully guide the devs to get a fix.
I'm not linking directly because bugzilla blocks slashdot links to avoid server load: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258950
The account the screenshot is from is an old account - created August 1999 - so I guess they're upgrading the accounts in chronological order.
I have both new and old accounts. My oldest was created around 1996 and it is still 2MB. My newest was from August and that is still 2MB. Chronological order isn't correct. Either that or the guy's just editing that 250MB in.
You (and anyone else for that matter) should hit up http://gmailswap.com/ if you really want a gmail account. I'd recommend checking out the "Neat, Nifty, and Noteworthy Swaps" for a good 10 minute chuckle.
You know you've lost it when you begin signing physical documents with =^_^=
obviously not in chronological order...as I have been actively using mine since 1997 and mine still says 2MB.
Honestly, my hotmail account is my oldest and most useful account, one of the hangups of going to linux is that I can't use outlook express and its (beta) functionality with hotmail. Are there any linux or alternative choices for win32 codebase mail systems that can access hotmail accounts?
just curious
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
I've had my account since November 1996... back before Microsoft had taken over... it was actually my first email account... it is STILL at 2MB...
I'd still never go back. I signed up in 1997, before M$ had anything to do with it. Sure, hotmail was good back then, but ever since M$ took away every good feature one by one, I abandoned them long ago. Features like free POP3, auto-forwarding, and no spam were nice in 1997. They even didn't require cookies. Now all that has changed years ago. When I logged in one day to see my Sent folder mysteriously wiped out, that was the last straw. Good riddance hotmail! You've been useless ever since M$ bought you!
- account deactivation after only 30 days (e-mail gets deleted, so do contacts!) - what if you go on vacation?! - pop-up ads - big ads on the top and to the side - more clicks to access e-mail...it doesn't show your new mail when you login (which is what you want to see 99.9% of the time) - Spam control sucks. On the strictest mode, it blocks e-mail from your friends (Yahoo!, G-mail)..on less strict, it allows too much spam. - No secure login. G-mail and Yahoo! use https. - Lack of features overall. (far fewer compared to Yahoo or G-mail) - Microsoft spam...can't block it! I use Yahoo! because of all the integrated features - address book, stocks, calendar, notepad, photos, etc., etc... too many to mention. Not only that, but their spam protection is outstanding, unless you decide to open some e-mail containing an image beacon. But after a couple weeks, the spam received becomes minimal. My only wish is that they incorporate more Gmail features...like opening your inbox when you login (!), or showing the e-mail address without opening the e-mail...