Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sure space is a big issue with the 2mb hotmail accounts, but I think my biggest problem with their service is speed. Even on a broadband connection, the pages usually load very very slowly. This was the main reason that I switched to gmail--it just loads faster. And to top it off, gmail offers 4*250mb plus features like conversations and a good quick spell checker. For me to switch back now, it will take a lot of *new* features on hotmail's service.
Boxing Equipment Reviews
Am I one of the only people who would rather use hotmail anyway rather than gmail or spymac? gmail to me is a confusing interface and spymac is down half the time. hotmail is just simple and it works
well it works in that maybe I am used to all its quirks and how to log in perhaps compared to gmail. Many years of habit make light work as they say
I've had my hotmail account since way before it became MSN Hotmail, and I've had my 250mb since mid August. Which means...
MORE SPAM!! YEAH!!!
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.
1GB is still bigger than 250mb.
Unless of course your living in a reality distortion field.
---
-
"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous." - David Bradley, inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Del
I use hotmail as moy spam collector, any time it says "Enter email" they get a hot mail and i keep my gmail squeeky clean. As for 250mb, i think M$ is just being cheap again, for a global monoply they have a pretty bad mail service.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Swell! More spam can fit in.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
...for the Spam.
Seriously, I had a Hotmail account, which I used for testing purposes only. Never, ever gave the address out for any reason, and that thing was inundated with crap every single day...
My theory is that MS sells the user list to spammers...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
My biggest pet peave other than space with hotmail is the link system.. it opens new links in a new window but within another frame. It would be nice if there was an option in the settings to turn this "feature" off.
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.
but many people use outlook to access hotmail. So, hotmail still have its point, though I don't know how could hotmail make money by supporting outlook.
but if google make a browser and integrate the gmail into this browser, the story will be different. The gmail still could run as the way it is running and showing text ads. And people could use it as if it is a email client. So google will make money from gmail.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
It is not all about space. Hotmail is old service and this email id is known to many of friends. So you need to keep this id for some time. But main problems are: ....
Slow working
Large Advertisements
No keyboard shortcuts
and so on
Bottom line: switch to GMAIL (read as get gmail invitation)
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
who here really uses hotmail as their primary account? ever since MS took over they have been the worst email service ever. eg, when you click on a link, it opens with a hotmail frame.
my teacher used it to send homework to our class, it wouldn't work because it only allows a maximum of 1 mass mailings.
do people not know about other options such as yahoo? or do people don't care?
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Don't forget that there are millions of people out there that are either happy with their Hotmail accounts and/or who would be greatly inconvenienced by abandoning those accounts altogether.
m aliases, the searching, the labelling as opposed to foldering approach, etc) but there's no way in hell that I'm going to abandoning my Hotmail account anytime soon.
I have both a Hotmail account and a Gmail one. My Hotmail one dates back to 1996 (maybe 1995), definitely before the date that the service was acquired by Microsoft.
My Gmail account is maybe six months old. Which do I prefer using? Well, for reasons other than the account size (ie, the superior filtering, the unlimited [accountname]+[anythingyouwanttoputhere]@gmail.co
Why? Well an eight (nine?) year-old email address has been the primary method of email communication for friends, family and others that want to contact me. If I were to abandon that email address, even after notifying everyone that I could think of who would want to send me an email, then I'm sure that there would be some messages that wouldn't get to me as intended.
And even if I could guarantee that all personal communication would suddenly come to my Gmail account, I'd still keep the Hotmail one, if only for site registrations, etc, that one day might lead to spam.
Does Hotmail compare well to Gmail? No. Is Microsoft increasing the size limit on Hotmail accounts a "me too" move? Yes. Does that mean that Hotmail is now redundant. No, not for me, not for millions of others.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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
Let's not forget the monthly "try msn messenger and the msn network and upgrade your account!!!" Microsoft spam that you're unable to block or filter out.
I think it's bullshit. I've had my hotmail account since 1997 and there's been no change to my account. I think that the MSN shill quoted in the article as saying that the accounts are being upgraded from the oldest to the newest is simply lying. That's not the way MS or MSN works. The way they probably are doing it is giving it to new sign ups in order to get people away from Gmail, and simply ignoring the rest. It's very easy for them to say, "Oh, because there are so many millions of hotmail accounts, we missed that one"
I offered to swap a gmail invite for an active hotmail account (with a password) at http://www.gmailswap.com/. No takers. If you cant kick the hotmail habit cold turkey then dont complain.
Instead of spam I get junk invites now. How many friends does google the think I have?
Add to that
Stupid javascript-based links so that you can't read multiple messages if different tabs on Firefox.
I don't believe the upgrades are in chronological order. If so, they skipped me. My (still) 2 meg hotmail account is from mid-1997. Before a "my hotmail account is older than yours" flamewar erupts; I acknowledge that Hotmail was around for well over a year before I received an account. Anyway, I use my old Hotmail account for every non-important email that I want sent to me and it gets spammed like crazy but Hotmail only squeaks through maybe 4 false negatives per day. I use my GMail account for every important email that I want sent to me.
I'm a big tall mofo.
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...
- 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...