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