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."

Comments

My Biggest Problem

[Klar]

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.

Re:My Biggest Problem

[dncsky1530]

Definately right, the one gig of space in gmail is just to get people to sign up for an account. once you use gmail all the features are great, even in beta. Hotmail will have to improve alot more than the storage space (which is obviously needed) their spam filtering isnt very good, my paypal comfirmation emails usually get filtered to the junk folder. The large ads advertising personals and classifieds aren't usually what you want to see when checking your mail.

250 megs is a start, but it's too little too late.

Re:My Biggest Problem

[paragon_au]

Gmail may be fast. But I, along with some other I know who use firefox, have problems sometimes opening e-mails.
Sometimes it'll just say 'loading...' in the top right forever. Even when you sign out and sign in it still has this problem. This is a MAJOR problem, and seem to only occur with the most recent e-mail about 1-5% of the time.

In fact, while I'm at it, anyone know how to solve this problem?

Re:My Biggest Problem

[pbranes]

Hotmail drags for everybody. Just check out this google search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=hotmail+slow&start= 0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=o rg.mozilla:en-US:official

I still only use Hotmail for signing up for forms where I *know* they will be spamming whatever account I give them.

Hotmail is just too little too late for me to take it seriously.

Re:My Biggest Problem

[AnwerB]

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.

Re:My Biggest Problem

[Glonoinha]

No, I would say the #1 problem is that Hotmail deletes your account if you are inactive for a month and there is no way to get your email history back.

Im glad for one

[Saven Marek]

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

Re:Im glad for one

[lukewarmfusion]

Are you still using Lotus 1-2-3, too?

indeed?

[valkyriekl]

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!!!

Not chronological

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hotmail stil has some uses

[NIK282000]

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.

Frames

[signore pablo]

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.

not sure what order they're doing it in

[drgroove]

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.

hotmail?

[Coneasfast]

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?

Thanks for pointing out the obvious...

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

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.com 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.

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.

Re:Am I...?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On another note, can someone enlighten me as to why they are upgrading the accounts so slowly? Shouldn't it be a quick and easy scripted task (unless they're editing the records one at a time)?

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!

Re:Well it is not all about space

[almostmanda]

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.