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."

Comments

Exaggeration? Naaah.

[bluephone]

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.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[SnowZero]

No kidding, "conspiracy and mail fraud" is way over the top. There's probably a loophole in the ToS anyway to cover this.

What you will probably see is angry users and complaints; That's the right way to solve this sort of thing. I wish the populate would try complaints or a boycott instead of jumping immediately to calls of corruption and a class action lawsuit.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[ameyer17]

Yeah, because Hotmail is a pseudo-governmental entity with special rules governing it. Now, they might be liable if discarding the attachment caused some sort of damages. I suspect this may be partly because of an attempt at spam filtering since many spammy emails have attachments.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[Nutria]

Yahoo regularly drops my e-mails if I attach a multi-megabyte file, without any bounce or warning. Also, I pay for this mail service, so it's not just the free accounts.
[snip]
Yahoo also forwards hundreds of spam e-mails to me every day, and SFAIK, there's not much I can do about it.

Sure you can!! You can stop paying Yahoo for shoddy service.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because hotmail is usually sooooooo good at stopping actual spam emails...

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Like giving people a full refund? :) MS could probably afford it.

Hotmail has been running for many years with what, millions of users, that's got to be a LOT of ad impressions that users have paid with to use the service. Let's say 10 impressions per session, at an average of 3 sessions per week for 2 million users for 10 years.

That's 10 * 3 * 52 * 2,000,000 * 10 = 31,200,000,000 ad impressions.

Assuming Hotmail has been dredging the users' email to provide targeted impressions, that's got to be at least 0.1 cents per impression, so 31B * $0.001 = $31M.

So $31M as a bare minimum to give people a full refund. That's certainly within MS's reach.

Oh wait, you thought because the users only indirectly pay MS through the fees MS charges advertisers for the user's attention that really the user's weren't paying anything at all? Like MS ever gives away something for nothing.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[stephanruby]

"The bit I hate about hotmail is how they still sell addresses to spammers, year after year, and nobody calls them on it. Every few years I do a test, by creating an email address somewhere and letting it sit for a while. After a few weeks or months checking that it gets no spam, I send one email from a hotmail account to that email address. Within hours or days it's then receiving spam emails, and almost always the stock scam or mortgage type. "

That's hardly positive proof. When an email comes out of hotmail, it will go through intermediaries before reaching your test address. Any of these intermediaries (not just Microsoft) could be responsible for leaking your information (and notice, I used the word 'leaking', not 'selling'. Demonstrating a leak is one thing. Proving that Microsoft is purposely selling your information behind your back is another).

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[Bert64]

But hotmail aren't really a commercial email provider...
They are intentionally providing a low grade without-cost service. The user agreement even says so, and gives you no guarantee of mail delivery.
If you want a reliable mail service, use something else.
If you just want a throwaway account to sign up for some pointless website, well hotmail is reasonable i guess.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[Stanislav_J]

So $31M as a bare minimum to give people a full refund. That's certainly within MS's reach.

Considering as how a large portion of Hotmail accounts are obtained with totally bogus sign-up information, I'd be willing to bet most of that money would end up absolutely nowehere. The folks that use Hotmail to engage in dubious dialogue and activities behind a spouse/partner's back, or to register for throwaway one-time visits to sites that require an e-mail address, or just in general to have some small, pathetic level of pseudo-anonymity are not going to come out of the shadows to get their huge refund of a couple of bucks apiece.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[jsse]

A lot of spams have small attachments containing the actual spam...

Right, but they're typically small.

Remember, while spammers hurting us, they still need to pay the bandwidth cost. Even when they could find cheap(or free) bandwidth, they want to spam us fast.

Of course, 500K is a moving target. I could foresee the default limit would be 1MB next year. In fact we're dealing with large PDF spams from the local spammers at this moment, as they could deliver fast spams locally.

Sad part is that most customers do not realize the existence of this limit before purchase.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[suv4x4]

Man you're so convincing, you gotta get a lawyer and demand your money back right now. If someone laughs, ignore 'em, it's because they're jealous they didn't think of it first.

I'll try, with your, permission, the same business model to see if I can get the New York representatives pay me, because of all the billboards.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[ShaunC]

I think you totally missed the joke. For most users, Hotmail is a free service.

Re:Exaggeration? Naaah.

[nikclev]

Ok: Assume I have a Hotmail account. How did I even indirectly pay for anything associated with it? I didn't pay anyone, anything at all to get or use my hotmail account. I help fund MS, or at least defray the cost of operating hotmail, but no money of mine in any way came out of my pocket to go towards hotmail. So, a full and complete refund to me would be a big fat goose egg.

Startling discovery

[RightSaidFred99]

It's amazing that Hotmail drops "up to" 81% of all attachments! My gosh, one would certainly begin to wonder why nobody else has noticed this and why there hasn't been a massive uproar! This lone, rational crusader has found a massive conspiracy hiding in plain sight!

Haha. I've pooped more meaningful articles.

Re:Startling discovery

[Brandybuck]

Since when do conspiracy mongers need facts? Make shit up and publish it, that's their motto.

Spam filter?

[Corbets]

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...

Conspiracy and mail fraud?

[ChromeAeonium]

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.

Re:I'm skeptical

[tokul]

Someone would have noticed if 80% of emails with attachments were not delivered!

And some people noticed that something is wrong with hotmail.

Email servers should not drop messages. Messages must land in some mailbox or they must bounce back to sender.

Maybe it really *is* a feature!

[akkarin]

From the article:

Each day, I would log onto Hotmail-1 and send/receive that day's twenty emails to Hotmail-2 Did he ever consider that the spam filters at Hotmail, or his ISP of choice, considered it suspicious that he sent 20 email, all within a few minutes of each other, all with attachments, all to the same account?

cowboyneal should be ashamed...

[snotty]

Disclosure - I work for Microsoft... but come on... this is not even good enough to be a April Fools day joke...

What about this "It's bullcrap"?

[spoco2]

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.

Scientific Method

[BillGatesLoveChild]

Easily solved: Someone repeat their experiment and see if what they claim checks out.