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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."

46 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Exaggeration? Naaah. by bluephone · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 ]
    1. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Architect_sasyr · · Score: 4, Funny

      Email is not ruled by the same laws governing the USPS. Assuming the statistics are correct (81%? I've never lost a single email) I would assume that the laws are EXACTLY the same as the USPS (or the AusPOST for that matter). ;)
      --
      Me failed English...
      FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
    2. 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.

    3. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by eclectro · · Score: 4, Funny

      the name "Microsoft" just turns of the "rational thinking" switch. No, it just turns the screen blue.
      --
      Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
    4. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by ameyer17 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by zCyl · · Score: 4, Funny

      There's probably a loophole in the ToS anyway to cover this.

      Like giving people a full refund? :)
    6. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Nutria · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

      --
      "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
    7. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by kennygraham · · Score: 4, Funny

      Oh, I remember. To ASSUME makes you think things are mail fraud when they're not, because you really have no knowledge of the relevant laws, but you think you do! How could I have forgotten. I like your version too tho. :)

    8. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    9. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by DragonWriter · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Oh dear lord. Email is not ruled by the same laws governing the USPS. There is no mail fraud here people!


      If Microsoft, like many other online service providers, advertises or solicits business via the mail (certainly, they've done that for MSN, though I don't know if they have for Hotmail per se), it is governed by the same law that governs anyone else making such solicitations (not the USPS, but other postal service users).

      OTOH, any online fraudulent solicitations by Microsoft would be more likely to be wire fraud, but Microsoft may be insulated from such charges from "free" users since Microsoft, while it uses them to get money from advertisers who hope to target them, does not get money or property from the users directly.

      On the third hand, depending on how they market to advertisers, they may be guilty of fraud (regular, wire, mail, or all three) if they've misrepresented to them the kind of service their advertising will be associated with, since that is quite arguably a material misrepresentation directly to induce the advertiser to give money or property to Microsoft.

    10. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by scbysnx · · Score: 3, Funny

      NO .. to make assumptions makes an ass out of you.. and mumptions

    11. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by stephanruby · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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).

    12. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Akoman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    13. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by jsse · · Score: 4, Informative

      I suspect this may be partly because of an attempt at spam filtering since many spammy emails have attachments.

      Quite the opposite.

      Fyi., typical spams are less than 100K overall, so majority of the commercial spam filters are not scanning mails for spamming when individual size exceeds 500K. Of course you could change the default, but the performance would be dragged down severely.

    14. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Gentlewhisper · · Score: 5, Funny

      >> What was that thing they used to say when I was a kid about assuming?

      It makes an ass out of u and ming?

      Lots of Mings in china though, be careful with your insults!

      --
      Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
    15. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      A lot of spams have small attachments containing the actual spam...
      They used to be images (gif, jpeg) but spam filters started getting wise and running OCR software, now PDF files are all the rage because most of the OCR programs can't handle PDF yet.
      Those of us using text based mailers don't even see the actual spam.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    16. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    17. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      It's pretty simple: you are allowed, in return, to display some of your ads to Hotmail staff.

    18. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by geggibus · · Score: 3, Funny

      Sweet. It's so hard to find a place to advertise my goatcx t-shirts..

    19. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

      Dear Friend,

      Please do not be offended to receive my message in this manner as I ought to have sought your consent and approval before e-mailing this proposal to you. I acted as I did due to the importance and urgency the situation demanded.

      I own just over half of the 'Spam' accounts on hotmail and I will soon receive just over half of the $31 million dollar refund. I need some help transferring this money out of Nigeria...

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    20. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by aichpvee · · Score: 5, Funny

      Jackasses tend to give away their opinions for free on /. all the time.

      --
      The Farewell Tour II
    21. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by ShaunC · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      --
      Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
    22. Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. by Larry+Lightbulb · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm supposed to put my head through that hole?

  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.

    1. Re:Startling discovery by Cassius+Corodes · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think it would have carried more weight if it included other free email providers not just ISPs to compare to.

      --
      Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
  3. Hard time believing the story by jomagam · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been using Hotmail infrequently for years and never lost an attachment.

  4. Spam filter? by Corbets · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Spam filter? by gujo-odori · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

  5. This is cool by kingdon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. 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.

  7. How about that. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:How about that. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      From TFA:

      If Intent Can Be Proven, Cisco Could Face Millions Of Packets Fraud Charges

      Cisco's market capitalization is approximately $133 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 101 years. To put it another way, it's a pile of stacked $100 bills 10 feet wide, 24 feet deep and 16.8 stories high.

      You would think that someone in San Jose, California could take time out from counting all that money to actually do something to earn it? Like maybe fix the ridiculously obvious and painful bugs that have been haunting Cisco users not since the launch of CRS-1, not since the launch of Cisco 12000, not since the launch of Cisco 10000, not since the launch of Cisco 7000, but since before the launch of Cisco SB107?

      Haha, you say! What bug could possibly have survived Microsoft's insecticide for so long? Since Microsoft took over Cerent Corp in 1999, almost a full decade ago, Cisco users have decried the loss of data packets. For the uninitiated, here's how it works...

      Step 1: Drop packets
      Step 2: ???
      Step 3: Profit!

  8. I'm skeptical by WoTG · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  9. Bullshit by dedazo · · Score: 3, Interesting
    What the fuck? I regularly send myself emails with all sorts of attachments from work to my Hotmail account. Other than the occasional spam false positive, I've *never* once failed to receive them. This is an infantile "investigation" at best, another AdSense dollar troll "let's bash Microsoft because it's cool" FUD blog whore with a chip in his shoulder and some really painful grade school grammar.

    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
  10. Not only mail fraud and conspiracy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not only mail fraud and conspiracy - don't forget kidnapping (if the attachments were ever sentient) and probably murder (same)

  11. Gmail by tsa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  12. Profit? by Z80xxc! · · Score: 3, Funny
    1. Send a bunch of emails with attachments and with titles like "V!agra", "OEM CHEEP Sotware", "Slashdot Daily FUD", etc.
    2. Never check spam box
    3. Write an article full of FUD
    4. Submit is to Slashdot
    5. ???
    6. Profit!!
  13. This is *paid* Hotmail service by billstewart · · Score: 4, Informative
    If you RTFM, you'd see that this was paid Hotmail service, not just the free service. So they ought to be providing professional quality service, and apparently they're not.


    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
  14. 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?
    --
    This sig left intentionally blank.
  15. cowboyneal should be ashamed... by snotty · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  16. 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.

    1. Re:What about this "It's bullcrap"? by spoco2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, I've just sent an email with a excel attachment from one account to my hotmail... delivered
      Then I forwarded that to another isp account... delivered
      Then I created an email in hotmail with 2 jpegs and sent it to my first account... delivered
      Then I forwarded that back to hotmail... delivered

    2. Re:What about this "It's bullcrap"? by cheater512 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The title is inaccurate. The summary is good.

      Its saying that old attatchments are deleted.

  17. I haven't seen this behavior by MLease · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  18. Scientific Method by BillGatesLoveChild · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  19. Similar Behaviour Witnessed by Afty0r · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.