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."
I've been using Hotmail infrequently for years and never lost an attachment.
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.
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...
There's nothing anyone could sue for; like most everything else, Hotmail comes with no warranty, express or implied. And because they don't charge for it and have no SLA, the biggest shyster lawyer in the world couldn't throw anything at that wall that would stick.
The spam filter idea is indeed the most likely cause, though. I've been in the email security business for four years and was a postmaster at an ISP before that, and this phenomenon has "spam filter" written all over it.
Well, OK, second most likely. I read TFA and what it really has written all over it is "bullshit." Description of the test mails is pretty sketchy, doesn't mention if the attachments were fake, real, or some mix of the two, if they contained spam or viruses or not, etc. (if they did, it would certainly produce numbers like TFA puts up), no samples of the mails used, etc. In short, it bears little resemblance to what one might call a "real" study. I'm sure I'm not the only mail admin who read it and called BS.
The whole thing reads like nothing but a smear job on MS, and a million miles from unbiased. I dislike MS as much as anyone, but TFA is just whack. I mean, there's so many bad things about so many MS products that we *know* are true, why does somebody need to make up stuff like this?
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!
You totally missed the joke. This is regarding the fact that you are supposed to be able to receive a full refund for unused OEM copies of Windows on your computers but this has traditionally (and I believe continues to be) impossible to actually obtain. Which is probably a EULA thing or something equivalent to a TOS.