Slashdot Mirror
Hotmail Delivers Far Fewer Emails with Attachments
biednyFacet writes "It has long been suspected that there is a silent policy that makes Hotmail automatically delete the majority of attachments to save on bandwidth and internal disk space. Therefore it really doesn't matter if every client has access to 2GB of storage since they don't deliver the attachments to fill that space up anyway. If that truly is the case, then Microsoft may be liable for several hundred million cases of conspiracy and mail fraud."
Oh dear lord. Email is not ruled by the same laws governing the USPS. There is no mail fraud here people! And conspiracy? Give me a break. At worst it's false advertising. It's like the name "Microsoft" just turns of the "rational thinking" switch.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Haha. I've pooped more meaningful articles.
I've been using Hotmail infrequently for years and never lost an attachment.
I know we all love to bash MS, but they are *good* at making money and unlikely to put themselves in quite such a position where it'd be easy to sue them (well, successfully).
I think the "over-zealous" spam filter explanation is much more likely...
No, stop the microsoft-bashing long enough to look at what is going on here.
The left hand invents a bloated file format that makes a 2000-byte document take up a megabyte (or whatever the exact anti-compression ratio is). (For current purposes, we'll say Microsoft Office. Not the only offender, but the most amusing in this context).
Now, the right hand figures out that they don't feel like sending all those bloated bits over the wire. Users will eventually figure out they should be sending plain text, perhaps.
Just sit back and watch the show. If we had *tried* to promote open standards in email, we couldn't have done this well.
This makes no sense whatsoever. Conspiracy theory is the sophistication of the ignorant.
Sammy at Personafile
That seems a bit extreme to call it conspiracy and fraud. Lots of MS related things don't work half the time. Is it a conspiracy when IE doesn't load an image?
It may be worth noting that the first three paragraphs of the article were ranting about how much Microsoft sucks, so at least we know there was no bias.
WORST
ARTICLE
EVER.
It has long been suspected that there is a silent policy that makes network routers automatically drop packets to save on bandwidth. Therefore it really doesn't matter if every client has access to 1 GB/s of Ethernet, since the routers don't deliver the packets to fill up that bandwidth anyway. If that's truly the case, then router manufacturers may be liable for several hundred billion cases of conspiracy and wire fraud.
Someone would have noticed if 80% of emails with attachments were not delivered! Really, there are millions of hotmail.com users. At least a few of them get email attachments once in a while.
I'm guessing this "test" used emails that looked like spam. It would help to know which ISPs were used and how the messages were sent.
Or maybe there wasn't really a test and this is all just Slashdot spam.
Anyway, I expect that a hundred people are sending each other hotmail attachments right now, so we'll have better data in a few hours...
Comparing and ISP's mail service to Hotmail is like comparing apples to oranges; they're both email suppliers, but ISP's charge you lots of money a month and have significantly lower amounts of email.
Also, the article takes a lot of pains to say how perfect the experiment is. A perfect experiment would have included at least a handful of other free email services.
It's stories like this that cause slashdot's reputation to be a joke. Where's the story about Google missing its earnings? Instead we get BS stories like this.
Oh, and he never does mention if he checked his fucking spam folder. I wonder what's in there.
Seriously, this is just too fucking much. Made worse of course by the fact that Slashdot is now partaking on the page impression revenue. Next comes Digg and every other "news" website. Spreading FUD on teh interwebs sure is profitable!
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I'll let you know, but it aint looking good for the study. Unless things start failing quick, I don't think this is going to stand up to scrutiny. The interface is a PoS and very slow.
I had a long standing yahoo account and was loosing pretty much anything with attachements. I know that I was loosing mail woth attachements as they were going thru an email forwarder which I control. I have since moved mostly to gmail, and I no longer loose attachements.
Not only mail fraud and conspiracy - don't forget kidnapping (if the attachments were ever sentient) and probably murder (same)
This 'research' has much more value if the way Hotmail handles attachments can be compared to Gmail. This is just MS bashing in my eyes now.
-- Cheers!
Makes me wonder what kind of spam/virus attachments this guy sends.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
So... now anyone can post FUD on slashdot without any reliable sources or material and get a front page? Or was it just the microsoft bashing that granted it?
Vista...
Attempting to send an email. [Cancel] or [Allow]? (Click allow...) Too bad. Message deleted into oblivion.
Oblig
I, for one, welcome our new vanishing email overlords.
Treating email like snail mail will be a step back. Our (US) system of laws is so perverted by such false analogies that trying to hold MS liable for trimming the gross fat of attachments would be like inviting demons into your home. Best not to open that pandora's box thank you very much.
If you really want that attachment then save it to a local file or, at worst, use another means of "sending" it (post it to your web page with big flashing lights -- technically that's just as secure as email).
The Komies are behind it,
it Kuld be TRUE I saw it in the internet tbues
And as far as other ISPs charging you lots of money per month, that's not normally the case for *email* service. My DSL service does cost me about $50/month (but I've got static IP addresses), but my mail-forwarder is $15/year, my ISP where I've got a shell account and run procmail is $7/month, and my wife uses Fastmail as an email provider for $19/year (they've also got free mail and $15-onetime options.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This sig left intentionally blank.
It's possible that it ended up in the spam folders on his other ISPs - certainly *I'd* expect email from Hotmail containing a random attachment to be spam
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The whole article reeks of FUD, but at least I got myself a laugh out of it:
:)
> If emails were donuts, Hotmail would be HomerSimpsonMail
Priceless
2) Microsoft is above the law anyway.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I haven't used the system since: a) Microsft bought it b) Yahoo offered email service Really, who uses hotmail anymore?
I've been using hot mail for a long time (since 1998?) and have not observed this problem.
Wouldn't wire fraud be more applicable
Disclosure - I work for Microsoft... but come on... this is not even good enough to be a April Fools day joke...
Indeed. From TFA, it sounds like what he was sending back and forth was megabytes of meaningless garbage. Entirely possible that an aggressive spam filter would dump it. It should, if it's doing a good job.
And, er, good luck on trying to convince millions of Joe 'n' Jane Sixpacks (who are not, typically, sending 1.9 Mb PowerPoint slides to each other) that a hyperaggressive spam filter is a bad thing.
(I leave entirely aside the digg.com(TM) style teenage hysteria about mail fraud and conspiracy. Geez, the same guy who wants the gummint to intrusively monitor and regulate a private company's e-mail business probably shrieks like a little girl at the notion that the NSA might wiretap recent immigrants of Saudi extraction who make an unusual number of satellite phone calls to the lawless uplands of Pakistan. Talk about mental inconsistency -- it's a wonder some people's brains don't segfault twice a day.)
My guess is that Microsoft will have bought the drives in bulk (it's cheaper and easier) and are very unlikely to be coming even remotely close to being in a position where Hotmail couldn't be allocated an extra gig or ten for every user on the system. That's not to say the space actually has been made available, or that it'd be efficiently used if they did, only that I cannot imagine Microsoft not being in a position to do whatever they wanted. They're stupid and naive in many ways, but under-resourced they are not.
My other guess is that if they can afford to lose a billion dollars a quarter and still post a profit, I do not believe there are sufficient users on the Internet (never mind on Hotmail) to give them any significant cause for concern, so even if a lawsuit was attempted and succeeded (most unlikely), the most significance it'd have for them is that their turnover rate of chairs would go up. I'm surprised the EU court case is giving them so much grief. If a billion dollars is chump change, can't they just buy the EU and turn it into part of their corporate empire?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My company has send out free reports about How to Learn to Control your Emotiones with NLP and How to Understand your Personality with the Enneagram. These reports are around 1-2MB and we send them as PDF attachment to thousands of people many who use a hotmail account. There are problems with Hotmail, sure, but not because of dropped attachments. It never happens. Check it for yourself at http://usa.tiouw.com/ParticulierRapporten.php
Quick! everyone test that theory. Best way to find out is to send attachments to Hotmail accounts. In the news... Hotmail was brought to it's knees after several hundred thousand users tested the service to see if their attachments would actually get through. Film at 11. /nutty humor
I mean, I have had a Hotmail account since... um... 1998 or 1997 or something, a very long time anyway, and NOTHING that I've sent to or from it with attachments has EVER gone 'missing' in the wild.
Is it possible that this guy, who has questionable scientific methods, maybe created his emails (which he doesn't show us their contents so we can't check) in such a way that they looked liked SPAM? Attachments are awfully popular in spam, and if he was creating these random emails with random attachments then they probably looked a fair bit like spam to the Bayesian filters.
If he had created REAL emails with, oh, I dunno, a PURPOSE, then they probably wouldn't have been filtered.
It's just a guess... I have no proof, other than I've never, ever come across this 'phenomenon' of his, and he just doesn't even address Spam filters until late in the comments on his article, and even then he doesn't seem to 'get' how they work.
I might just do some tests and see what happens... I'll report back with what I find.
Try attaching a 1M file to a gmail send... Its quite slow. Often I have to try several times before a successful send. Further, I have never ever been able to send an attachment of size around 10M.
They dont have any limit on the attachment size by policy. You can try to send any size... they just timeout.
Who is liable?
it's a stretch but it could be considered wire fraud, if we can think that microsoft saved money by doing this intentionally. but it's a really far stretch. maybe if you all paid for those hotmail accounts there might be something to the argument. The service agreement that all users agree to when they create an account is likely iron clad anyways.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... I propose that nobody replicate the stated methods and compare their results with those from the article. An empirical test with hard data would make it impossible for everyone to prove their point by stating they never noticed what they didn't objectively test for, as well as making everyone who thinks the author is an idiot look like an idiot. Any such test would almost certainly prove the author to be as wrong as a football bat, but no matter how easily done it might be, it's far easier and lots more fun to throw more FUD at assumed FUD.
The pseudo-legal claims are, of course, symptomatic of recto-cranial inversion, but you can only argue with numbers if you have better numbers.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
He never had any. Ballmer, on the other hand.... hmmm, I like the smell of hot sexy monkey sweat!
Once upon a time Slashdot used to deliver the best of tech news and VALID views.
Nowadays we have to sift thru filthy garbage (like this post) to find an occasional gem.
I think the reason \. has slackenned is coz most of us are hooked to \. they know we will keep coming back .
"Drawing closer to world domination, keystroke by keystroke."
I have a Hotmail account I use as a backup for my real email. I send attachments all the time (usually around 70-80K, sometimes as much as 300K), and have not observed any losses. I'm not a M$ fan, but this article seems to be overstating the case, at best.
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
he is a furry though.. http://hubpages.com/u/42895_177.jpg
might have something to do with it
They simply remove spam/virus attachments. If you say, they removed more than that, then probably their anti-virus program is over eager. Just because it is M$ it is not necessarily evil.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
If I'm not mistaken the HotMail EULA states that every piece of data that is sent through HotMail becomes "(c) Copyright Microsoft Corp".
So the data that they are deleting is their own. They can do whatever they want with their own data. Right?
(The above condition is the reason why I don't use HotMail, by the way. I don't send mails to people with HotMail accounts either. How much copyrighted information, PM's, manuals have you donated to Microsoft this way? Ever sent any of your company's memos to a HotMail account? Does your boss know that you gave away their copyright?)
That's funny, I've never had a problem with Gmail attachments. In fact I once sent an attachment of a 10Mb zip file (pictures). This may not seem special, but:
/dev/null.
It was from an internet cafe in the middle of nowhere East Africa, on a computer running a shady copy of 98 loaded with crap-ware, and it froze up mid way through.
I didn't have the time to reboot and start over, so I just stared at a frozen screen for 10 odd minutes and then tried to get it to send. It worked. Outside of Africa, I've never had a problem with speed either.
Plus the fact that there is a program out there that lets you mount your gmail account as a network drive, by storing and sending the data as attachments.* Somehow I don't think that would work if they sent very many attachments to
*I played around with it when gmail first came out, haven't heard anything about it since. Anybody know what I'm talking about?
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Judging from the comments, this story does seem to be bull, but then again, it reminds me of two things. First, how Microsoft has had the unseen audacity to actually censor transfers of mp3-files etc. over MSN/Windows Live Messenger (censor as in allowing the file to be transfered just to delete it and popup a warning about harmful files as you click "open file..."). Second, the lovely spam filter which is about as accurate as a drunk butcher with a blunt cleaver during spring break.
Don't be crazy anymore!
If you look about two thirds down the comments, the author describes his methodology, and the word 'random' appears a little too often. At the moment about 80% of the spam that I receive in my spamtrap account has an attachment and consists of random strings of text. While I have seen that Hotmail is far too ready to dump legitimate mail into the Junk folder and let junk through, I don't believe that it does so at the level by which the author describes.
In addition, why use Hotmail? There are better free services and have been for some time. For reliability of delivery, I would never trust a free service. In fact I was stunned to read about the person in the replies who uses Hotmail to save backups! The rule is caveat emptor. If your mail is being eaten by your provider, then take it somewhere where it won't be.
Easily solved: Someone repeat their experiment and see if what they claim checks out.
Does anybody care? E-mail is a heap of toss anyway. For every one legitimate e-mail, I get about ten assorted others peddling dodgy shares, "men's health" products, replica watches and counterfeit software. And I have paid for a domain name and MX record, and own the machine to which it points.
Hotmail is an even bigger heap of toss than ordinary e-mail. Providing an e-mail address costs someone money (for the domain registration, and the maintenance of the server -- to say nothing of mains and net). With Hotmail, you don't pay anything for it, therefore you're being sold to advertisers as a potential viewer. Once you cease to be a person and become a product, you can expect your owners to treat you with slightly less care than the average National Express driver lavishes on a passenger's suitcase.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
From the article,
"Microsoft's market capitalization is approximately $300 billion dollars. Let's put that into a bit of perspective. That's enough money to feed and provide medical care for every single AIDS orphan in Africa for 227 years"
No, it's not. It's a kind of indirect lie - because it implies that the money of Microsoft's market cap is the same kind of and could be used for providing such aid.
The market caps of companies represent the value free investors place on their entire future earnings stream and/or book assets. In Microsoft's case, the former is seen as quite large. What contributes to a high market cap is everything that could be seen as providing value 10+ years into the future - including e.g. how smart your employees are. You could probably trace a relationship that said e.g. every employee you take on equals ~£5m more market cap, very simplified.
Now, if you tried to _spend Microsoft's market cap_ for something, several things would happen. Firstly, any investor who held Microsoft stock would value it at a lot less, because of all the risks of regulation and nationalisation - hence, overnight, it would/could drop 70% in value. Secondly, if you 'sell the company' into pieces, every employee that left would wipe off e.g. $10m - far more than the value of their yearly salary in any case. Were you selling off or significantly changing the status of Microsoft all corporate customers would likely have the right to renegotiate and may pull out, and hence contracts cannot be valued at current levels either. The proper value to use would be the book value plus the value of IP that could be sold off/transferred minus the monumental costs associated with liquidation.
Market cap is a bit like US GDP - the more of it you want to spend on development aid, the less it suddenly becomes.
So after some further investigation I have concluded that:
1) You don't actually seem to give up your own copyright to whatever you post; you only accept to share the copyright with Microsoft. I.e. You grant them every right that the copyright law gives you (as being the original copyright holder). So whatever you posted on HotMail now should be re-labelled "(c) Me and Microsoft".
2) In addition, if the posting contains any graphics, pictures, art or similar, You also grant a royalty-free but revocable license to the general public.
I firmly belive that anything posted to HotMail becomes "(c) Me and Microsoft". However, I do not understand why the second part (regading images) would benefit MS, or why they seem to think that such a clause is nescesary.
Can anyone enlighten me on this?
I run an email server and a list with about 60 members which has regular daily discussions about a card game... my hotmail members do not receive about 10% of emails sent to the list - I've tested and verified this by adding a new Hotmail account of my own to the list.
There are no patterns - size/sender/attachment etc. The mails do NOT appear in the spam folder, and I can watch the SMTP logs in real time as the email is accepted by Hotmail, only to have it never arrive. I simply recommend that people do not use Hotmail and instead use another free email service like GMail.
Have had emails (with attachments) stored in hotmail, some for about 8 years now. Resumes, pdf files, serial numbers, etc etc. So a pretty good variety of attachment types. All still there...just waiting for that dire emergency where I will say "gee, glad I had those online somewhere" Now, should they delete them - fine - I have backups. That I actually check. With more than one for the really important stuff. Which begs the question - **WHY** would you store really important stuff on hotmail anyway, that you might need long term ? tsk tsk tsk. Relying solely on one point of storage for important data, especially when you have zero control on what happens to it. BTDT, TESTED backups are your friend.
I stopped using hotmail about 3 years ago for this reason, very few attachments were delivered, out of 10 I would say 2 got delivered and it was not even close to the limit, the last time I used the service I was trying to send 10 pictures to a client and I tried different ways to get them delivered, compressing them into one archive, splitting etc... I also tried sending the files to a different account and no attachments were delivered.
Spammer thinks: Gee, I know how to get Hotmail to let through more of my spam ... I'll get the Slashdot crowd to raise a firestorm about attachments that aren't delivered!
Rest of us think: Man, they only get 81% of the junk? How can we help them improve the kill ratio?
Although I am occasionally amused by the random babble e-mails that the spammers send, the collective weight of the UCE would give me reason to vote for just about any Death-penalty-for-spamming law that ever pops up on the ballot.
Draco the Lawgiver would be proud.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
Of course anyone cares. People rely on Hotmail unfortunatly, journalists, business people. That fact that Hotmail silently drops these emails is a totally unaceptable.
Re:Not News
davecb5620@gmail.com
Ok Microsofties, you can all stop posting now. You are sucessfull in packing the thread with off topic drivel.
davecb5620@gmail.com
they permanently banned my work email for this because we have to send small flash files to each other for the machines i work on. i was at a site and couldn't download a file on my pocket pc. i thought my phone was messed up. several hours later i gave up and went home and there i see a the message along with another telling me that the domain has been permanently banned. i'm really pissed and i hope someone sues the hell out of them.
all I know is, my Hotmail account gets tons of spam while my Yahoo account only gets about 1 a day in the main inbox... _ edit: Hotmail = spam (now is this post long enough?!)
for the PDF's.. you can (well windows can) scan the interior of PDF's very well..
at my office, to go paperless, we scan all receipts into pdfs with a very good scanner.
when looking for a certain piece of paper, utility bill, invoice, receipt, govt filing.. we drill down to the last reasonable folder (sometimes we search the entire year's worth of stuff) and ask windows to look for key phrases in the file... and it does a great job..
I can type in a specific dollar amount (one occasionn that worked perfectly) and get back a copy of a delivery slip, the invoice, and the bankstatement all based on typing in the dollar amount......
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If you don't like the free service from Hotmail, go somewhere else! It's what everyone is allowed to do in a free market. I ditched Hotmail for Gmail a long time ago.
The game.
I didn't know email was overseen by the US Postal service.
Might be another form of fraud involved here if its true, ( which will be hard to stick on them for a *FREE* service.. ) but i really don't think you can call it *mail* fraud.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Because _I THOUGHT_ the joke was regarding the fact that it's a FREE SERVICE and a check for a FULL REFUND would literally not be worth the paper it's written on.
The only problem I have ever really had with Hotmail is that back in the late 90's I spent 6 weeks in a hospital. Of course, I didn't know at the time that I was going IN to the hospital, so I couldn't really let people know I wouldn't be online.
Instead of deleting the NEW emails or bouncing them, Hotmail deleted my old / saved emails. (Even those in separately saved folders.)
Yeah. I lost a lot of important emails during that time and I was never able to get them back. I was quite upset. (I still am when I think about it... grrr..)
Other than that, I've never really had a problem with my Hotmail account.
When they offered more space for a yearly fee, though, I did pay for that, so maybe it's only free accounts which have the problems?
Kris
Remember when Windows were washed, mice were trapped and UNIX guarded the harem?
Canadians will shrug it off, saying they don't have the time to bother, and Americans will sue, stating emotional distress (or something). Europeans will continue to use any other email host, and us nerds will carry on hosting our own email servers, continuing to laugh at people using Microshaft products.
Ryan
Since Hotmail is the only web based mail out there, it's not like you can switch to another vendor.
Oh wait, I guess there are thousands of other vendors you could choose from.
For the record, I had a Hotmail account for about a year until I switched to gMail. I don't plan on going back.
... if that's your best, your best won't do... - Twisted Sister
Microsoft delivers crapware and now its email service is crap too. News at 11!
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Thats exactly the problem! We are tied into one provider just because we want to keep our current email address, I should be able to change providers for aywwts@yahoo.com to gmail, and I want to do this as I ride my motorcycle.
Someone get ted stevens on the phone, the lord of internets should figure this out.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
>> There are 11 types of people in the world, those who know binaries and those who don't.
Guess which category you fall into.
I set up a hotmail account recently, and sent a few test messages to it. Only 1 out of 10 got through. The others didn't go into my spam-filter, they just didn't get through. I complained, never got an answer. It really makes me want to buy their upgraded service. NOT! (Sorry for the 1990's phraseology, it seemed appropriate)
You'll be appaled to learn that you are the latest in a long line of know-it-alls at the end of their know-all streak.
I'll give you the chance to show how clever you are by leaving the reveal as an exercise for the non-reader.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I no longer know a single person who uses Hotmail for their personal email account (not there aren't a few left who do, but I don't know them). In fact I'm pretty sure that Hotmail's raison d'etre is spam. It is the home of spammers. So I really don't care what MS does with it because it is to me a worthless service anyway.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
Is it time to stage a mass defection to gMail yet?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Why do we have to type in average.joe@hotmail.com to login when we are already at the hotmail url? What if there are msn users too? Can't the jackasses who coded this, take care of this trivial but annoying discomfort to the users? I use my hotmail id ONLY to login to sites that require a .net id.
I am already planning an experiment to refute this really bad report. Please visit my blog and catch up on it as I begin the experiment next Monday.
This whole thing looks so easy to test that MS better fix it quick, before a few hundred supporting tests really blow the lid off of this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have sent attachments to myself from another non-Hotmail account to my Hotmail account and vice versa many times and have never noticed this. Perhaps the messages get caught in the spam filter?
Just an observation: In all of your articles, it seems like you could be either:
a) leaving out obvious things, seemingly in an attempt to get people to bash you for leaving them out of the article or assume that since you didn't mention it, you didn't do it (which is the reason most people don't mention things in articles like this). If this is the case, it seems to be for the sole purpose of making snarky "Of course I was duley dilligent in that respect, idiot" type remarks to/about people who point these things out.
b) not being duley dilligent and lying about it.
But since I don't actually know, I'm not going to accuse you of doing either, because accusing people of things without having significant evidence is stupid. It would be even stupider, if I did know that one of those things was the case, I wrote a big angry article about it leaving out a whole bunch of factors, interlacing fact with gut-feeling opinion, and drawing a whole bunch of pseudo-conclusions based on a string of 2 or 3 what-ifs for which no attempt was made to verify.
The reason why most people are angry isn't because they disagree with the pie charts, it's because you don't have your shit straight when you're trying to present what you've found. It's very remniscent of getting into an argument over roll playing game rules with a lazy nerd who's very smart, but too lazy to pick up the rule book to cite what he's talking about.
And I'm assuming here that you're not just trying to make people angry, even though you seem to be proud of it when you do. *If you are, please consider* the fact that writing a well thought out, completely air-tight article would probably make you much more proud than getting people to scream at you through the holes in the 'controversy stirring' articles. It really seems that you start out your research to prove your point rather than to find the answer. If this is the case, it's extremely poor form. Ask yourself this: Would you have taken the time to let people know that hotmail was very reliable for sending/recieving attatchments if the data had indicated that no attatchments, or very few attatchments had been dropped? If the answer is no, you might want to consider shutting up and leaving things like this to the grownups. If so, then you've got some stylistic changes to make if you're really looking to make a difference.
If you're looking to change people's minds, or make people think, you've done a great job. If you're looking to change people's minds, or make people think about the content of your research, you've done a terrible job. Unfortunately all you're doing is changing people's opinions of you, and getting them to think that you're a complete jackass, and that may very well not even be the case.
most of the comments were already dealt with on the blog site in response to comments there.
Bottom line: the test was valid, if limited in geographical scope and number of network paths solely because the guy isn't capable of doing more.
Also, while he suspects Microsoft is doing this to save money, he cannot of course prove that it isn't simple stupidity with spam filters or whatever on the part of the traditionally moronic Microsoft staff.
Still, with Microsoft, stupidity tends to equate with Bill Gates desire to make money by cutting corners to his customers. So the guy may be right about the motivation and the methods being used.
The bottom line: Hotmail sucks. Like most Microsoft products.
I'm so surprised.
Like one couldn't tell by the simple fact that you can't get your email OUT of Hotmail when you want to switch to another method. I had a client who wanted me to do that. We managed to get Thunderbird to download new email from Hotmail, but getting the old stuff out via Outlook Express or Outlook was nearly impossible. (To be fair to Microsoft - barely, part of that was the screwed up Outlook installation he had.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Yeah, but I bet if you send an .odt or .ogg file it will get "lost"... :)
Have a good one,
-mat
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
yahoo has been automatically sending all my emails with attachments to my Trash folder for about 2 years now. It's also decided that ALL my email from my sister is Trash - even though I have set 2 seperate filters to put it in a seperate folder. nb. I have emailed webmaster@yahoo.com half a dozen times complaining about these issues and haven't even had a reply!!
I don't mind if the anti-spam system lies to the sender (e.g. "username unknown" instead of "die, spammer, die"), though I generally prefer true responses ("553 your system is RBL'd at http://etc/"). There's an argument that says that most of the mail you're rejecting is spam, so it's better to leave the spammers ignorant about how you recognized them as opposed to telling legitimate senders what kind of false positive they got hit by. IMHO that's mostly wrong-headed - most of the spammers aren't going to respond to your error message except by giving up on that delivery, and often they won't even bother removing the "bad" addresses from their target lists (though some of them make money selling that kind of detail to other spammers.) But there is some small fraction of spammers and spamware sellers who will use that information to push the arms race.
Friends of mine have an international human-rights organization that really *does* get legitimate email from some people in Nigeria who are probably using cybercafes....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Perhaps this is what happened to the info on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
All email server administrators have to make choices about how much to filter users email for SPAM and how to handle Virus/Worm/etc infected messages.
Some companies go beyond the norm and have their virus filters rejecting email as "infected" when in reality it isn't.
Example: Godaddy.com treats ANY email message with a link to ANY geocities.com page in it as "infected". At first they were returning the messages to the sender with an infected email error message. Many people complained, so Godaddy had to do something.
They figured that the main reason people were complaining was the rejection messages.
GD SOLUTION: dump the messages without notifying the person the message was from/to that this is happening. This has been going on for over a year.
You shouldn't assume that because you're not having a problem with your favorite email service that there can't be a problem affecting other users in a very negative way.