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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.)
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.
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!
Easily solved: Someone repeat their experiment and see if what they claim checks out.
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.
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?
They deleted my attachments, so I sued them and won. I just got my settlement voucher for 50% off the price of IE 7. Thanks Microsoft!!
"But this one goes to 11!"