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Hotmail Delivers Far Fewer Emails with Attachments

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dead-letter-office dept.

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."

5 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by SnowZero · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Startling discovery by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  3. Conspiracy and mail fraud? by ChromeAeonium · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Maybe it really *is* a feature! by akkarin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?
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  5. What about this "It's bullcrap"? by spoco2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.