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Some Hotmail Accounts Wiped
tomhudson writes "PC Magazine reports that many Hotmail accounts have lost all their emails. Users' entire email histories have apparently been lost. 'Users can still log in sans issue. However, they arrive at empty inboxes: No custom folders, no messages in "Sent" or "Deleted," nothing. As one might expect, the abruptness (and unexpectedness) of the purge has left some of Hotmail's long-time users a bit in the dark.'"
people still use Hotmail!
Besides, isn't it called something terrible these days like "Windows Live Hotmail"? Once more showing That things connected to "Windows" is a data loss risk.
I would have thought that any long term hotmail users must have been in the dark a long time ago, not to see the light of gmail. /googleFan.
We have it forced on us by my university, and as soon as it was possible, I set up everything to forward to my gmail account. Havent had to use the shoddy interface in a long time.
I use Zimbra, but whatever tool you use, do periodically slurp your webmail and back it up.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Maybe they finally tried to switch Hotmail over to Windows NT...
No sig today...
"Microsoft's product team is allegedly aware of the issue and is actively looking into whatever it might be."
Seriously? It's typical Microsoft incompetence just like Danger was. 'Nuf said.
OMG the email chains were all TRUE!!
you get what you pay for. If email is valuable to you, back it up yourself, or get a service which provides an SLA (uptime, backup, etc). MS's Hotmail specifically says they're not responsible for loss of data. But, people use it because it's free, then want to bitch when there's a problem.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
But can they log in sans serif?
Who's going to trust Microsoft to have a part of it? Am I the only person, after the whole Danger debacle and now this, who would never consider trusting Microsoft with any important data? This kind of thing looks really, really bad.
Make love, not reality television.
This happened to me on hotmail six years ago. Soon after I stopped using hotmail.
Does the author have any idea what that term really means?
You gets what you pays for. You're paying nothing except your privacy - which corporations demonstrably don't value highly - in exchange for a webmail service. One which explicitly declares in its terms and conditions that you have no expectation of data integrity.
And if you only ever use the web interface, there isn't even any chance that you've mirrored your mail to your local computer. Webmail relieves you of the responsibility of installing a mail client, backing up your data, etc.
Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.
Some people's parents still use hotmail!
This makes their new marketing slogan for Windows Live all the more humorous! 'To The Cloud' indeed! More like POOF!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
This is old news. If you don't log into your Hotmail account for 30 days, they wipe out all your emails. After 60 days, they wipe out your contacts and other custom settings. After a few more months, they delete your account. I lost all my historical emails in 2006; I didn't use my account for anything except keeping track of old emails from the 90s, but it also meant I lost contact details for a lot of friends I didn't contact often. This policy has been reported since at least Nov 2006.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
This could have happened to me!
Except I deleted my Hotmail account as soon as the service was bought by Microsoft. Must have been 'round December 1997.
Much like dealing with shit on your shoe. A little tedious at first but the stench disappears afterwards.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Do you? The author used it in a perfectly acceptable manner. "Sans" means "without". So "Users can still log in sans issue." can be read as "Users can still log in without issue." That describes the situation perfectly. Users can log in just fine, but they can't view their messages.
I appreciate it when people criticize the authors or submitters for their stupidity or ignorance, but that's just not the case here. You are the one who is in the wrong, and we should criticize you.
You can easily backup your emails by setting up an account with another webmail provider and set that to download and save email from your original account. Of course that means you are giving two companies access to your information, but since you used web mail to begin with, I'm assuming that you are ok with that.
deleted every email in the inbox?
finally hotmail's spam filtering works!
And that boys and girls is why cloud computing sucks.
Just because the mails aren't visible doesn't NECESSARILY mean they are deleted. It could just be a replication issue amongst certain servers(you see this happen on slashdot from time to time, ie a story looks like it doesn't have any comments because there was an issue updating the server you are currently using). Eventual consistency is a powerful tool, but things like this can easily happen if a problem occurs.
Monstar L
Actually it has been Hotmail policy to wipe your account if you don't use it for a while. I think it was 30 days. Can't remember as I haven't used Hotmail in 5 or 6 years. I do remember setting a reminder to check my Hotmail account monthly or else I would lose all the spam I hadn't read yet.
I come here for the love
About two years ago Yahoo changed some back end stuff to rid of the country based email system (I was .au) they had and to centralise everything. In the change many peoples accounts got wiped or they got locked out of their accounts. I got locked out of my account and couldn't remember what smart ass answer I had put in to the secret questions over a decade ago. Yahoo refuse to do anything if you can't get past the secret question and so now I have nothing to do with them.
P.S. Secret questions are the worst "security" feature ever. Either they are far too obvious and easy for casual acquaintances and Internet detectives to break (ala Sarah Palin) or you never remember the stupid shit you put in them many years in the past.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
How many "nines" did Microsoft promise with their supposed reliability?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
For Firefox and SeaMonkey, there is MozBackup to backup your local profiles, including the mailbox. While available only for Windows, it is Open Source and should therefore not easily disappear.
Of course, relying on MozBackup requires you to generally store your mails at home, not on the server.
C - the footgun of programming languages
"This makes their new marketing slogan for Windows Live all the more humorous! 'To The Cloud' indeed! More like POOF!" - by baptiste (256004) on Sunday January 02, @09:02AM (#34736930) Homepage
Ha - a "little correction/amendment" 4U... lol, see subject-line above!
APK
P.S.=> I haven't had this problem, & I've been using hotmail since it came out in beta (so it's a total "freebie" for me - I'm NOT really 100% sure how it works for others anymore though, as in IF it is "paymail" or 'free', etc./et al).
In any event, that's 1 nice thing MS has done for those of us that have been using the service since it's beta days - it doesn't cost us anything.
Still, upon reading this article here this A.M.?
Well, yeah - I was a WEE BIT worried when I saw this here today though this a.m. because I don't like losing email records anymore than the next person does (iirc, I am FAIRLY certain that the "Windows LIVE" email client DOES do a "local backup" of your email folders, IF you "sync it" & set it to do so, but do NOT "quote me" on that much either (as I haven't looked @ Windows LIVE's setup, in ages))... apk
Okay then. I should back up my mails. Lesson learned.
But how? I want a tiny application that downloads all mail via POP and saves each mail as a single file, either TXT or EML. Or in a better format? What would be a good file format?
I want the app to sort things into folders in years, maybe in months, maybe even days.
Once I have everything in file and folder structure, I can back it up myself... in another The Cloud. Or on a thumbdrive.
The only thing missing is the name of the program and goooogling didn't dig something up. I use a redmondish OS. Ideas?
> Try to create a new account. It will ask for a phone number.
You didn't, perchance, just try to leave that blank?
Last time I checked, it was possible.
We keep hearing about how MS wants to move to cloud-based services, with things like office. If they're not taking this extremely seriously and providing five star response, it shoots their cloud image in the foot.
But then, they seem to like shooting themselves in the foot. (you'd think by now they'd have ran out of toes?) I certainly wouldn't trust them to keep my documents safe if they demonstrate they can't even handle my email.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Get it while it's hot!
When MS acquired Hotmail, they tried to move from BSD to Windows/IIS, and failed (back then, anyway) miserably. Then they poured shitloads of commercials and bling into the UI of Hotmail. Finally, they intorduced a rather draconian policy, whereby if you didn't access your account in 30 days, you were locked out. Since I hated the commercials and the bling, I had a hiatus in Hotmail use, and got locked out. I also could NOT re-create the same account name, even if nobody was using it. Anyhow, I was locked out until that day when an exploit ("hack") was discovered, with which anyone could access anyone else's account, without supplying a password. Does anyone remember those happy days? So, I "hacked" into my own account. And yes, the account was there, with all the e-mails. Why the lock-out policy? I dunno, one of the many brainfarts generating from MS.
I remember opening my colleague's account and calling him over, just to show him it was possible. That was the last day he ever used Hotmail.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Yes, this is what cloud computing is really about.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/mmc-beta-production/assets/6818/lil_abner_article.jpg
If your "lucky", wackyleaks will upload all the old account data to /.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Btfsplk
More and more as I use Facebook to communicate with my friends and associates.. I realize that email is becoming less important to me. Instead of someone coming out with a new system designed to "fix" the email system flaws, Facebook seems to be quietly supplanting it with a richer media based experience. Down the road I expect that I'll be able to have multiple layers on FB, for friends, associates, business.. so I can show what I want to those within a group..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Hotmail startet on Solaris/*BSD-servers and was a charm to use... In January 1998 Microsoft bought Hotmail and tried to port everything to WindowsNT... In mid-2000 they finally started switching "some" of the frontend-servers from FreeBSD/Apache to Windows2000/IIS... Maybe now they are finally starting to port the database-servers also to Windows-HastaLaVista-New-Experience-Technology, so that's why data gets lost. :-)
It’s not a bug it’s a feature!
It’s a New Year and Microsoft has graciously given you a fresh clean start with your, I mean their email. No need to worry about the past . . . Embrace the new . . .
Yeah gotta love the cloud MS has been tokin up lately, I mean talking up lately.
What will come of all the spam lost in this tragedy? It confounds me how email systems like Hotmail and Yahoo keep users with all the spam that comes through. Last year, I found the name/pass of a Hotmail account I made five or more years ago. I logged in to around 3k messages in the inbox. Amazing.
As you all know, if you don't use your account you will lose it.
I lost mine about 4 years ago and went back recently to Hotmail and they let me in just fine, same password and everything.
At the very least, it's better than Google keeping all your stuff forever.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
A quick google of Hotmail data loss tales of woe shows that it is almost a yearly feature now.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
is still full of crap...
I use the "restored" without knowing what the problem was or how they fixed it, but "whatever glitch caused messages to temporarily disappear was resolved and the messages are now available to the users" doesn't roll off the tongue in a short title box. Their free e-mail had a brief outage. Yawn.
rain cloud all the data fell out.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Why settle for a wimpy ol' cloud when you can have a ThunderStorm? Post-Web direct p2p data redundancy with patent pending SpiralTrack technology so you can get up to the nanosecond data auditing at the bit level.
After all, those Web links aren't safe anymore - they don't come from Trusted Sources these days. Better to use LightningStrike secured data transmission protocols!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
One word... white list...okay two words. Only my contacts get into my inbox. Nobody else seems to have it.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Once it gets too hot...no more clouds.
Works every time.
Trusting clouds is well...trusting in vaporware.
So I don't have to manually empty all the junk email anymore? On a sadder note though I would no longer have any reason to login to Hotmail if they are going to do this on a regular basis.
Until one day in '04, when I logged in after having taken a bit of a break from the online world. It was the first time I'd logged in to my Hotmail in a month, so I expected there to be quite a lot of mail. There were plenty of new messages, but all of my old email was gone!!!!
I freaked out for a while, then read through the "terms of service" or whatever they were calling it at the time. Seems they had silently implemented a policy whereby they delete ALL of your email if you fail to log in for 30 days. Ten years worth of email GONE!!
I suppose they were trying to provide incentives for people to log in to their Hotmail more regularly, but it all it motivated me to do was to open a Gmail account immediately.
Sure, it was a free service with no guarantees. Perhaps I should have been making backups of my precious emails. Thing is, this was not something they did by mistake. This was a policy that they willfully implemented. They chose to punish their subscribers. I don't get it.
Microsoft sucks.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
It's a new year - this could be a date-related bug. Or it might be MS incompetence by a manager, as per Roz Ho and the Danger "cloud" data loss. Who knows? One lesson to derive is that Hotmail is essentially a "Cloud" service provided by Microsoft and Microsoft has hosed people's "Cloud" data. Would you trust MS to keep your data safe? Governments are, apparently. Governments are trusting YOUR data to the MS "Cloud". How long will it be before the headline "Government apologises for "losing" your data"? Happy Y2K+11 - Eadon
I wore the cheese one evening as a Hallowe'en costume. Won first prize for a costume with only a Kraft slice on my head.
Well, will you look at that, my account is empty too. It's also reverted my privacy settings back to default (Limited) instead of Private.
the hotmail back-end had a bug with year rollover and declared a bunch of accounts idle for more than 30 days, triggering a purge. I guess it could only be worse if you set an alarm on your iPhone to check your Hotmail. To quote Futurama:
O'Brien: So, people are getting pretty worried about this Y2K problem, huh?
Bender: No, they fixed that 900 years ago.
I think this has happened to every freemail provider at some point. Google has a long track-record of borking gmail accounts and worse: logging into other people's in-boxes.
Website Hosting
Why didn't Hotmail back everything up to the cloud?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I have a friend who uses (to me, now 'used') hotmail. Much like the reliability of their 'servers' (ask Skype what knocked them off the air!!! Hint... Buggy Software... I will NOT say it was Microsoft's Server mushware... )... 40 patches last month, followed by 2 (not new, but) serious un-patched problems, and Skype's 'non-serious' known issue... Said friend has been at logger-heads with hotmail problems. Finally, so many breaks, etc. I started getting scam mail from all over the world via his account... I trust the spammers much more than Redmond... and I don't trust Nigerian, Russian, Ukraine or, Romanian, etc, etc, etc spammers.
Hotmail has improved a lot in the recent years. It is still not nearly as good as gmail, but there are certainly much worse email providers out there.
You notice the story talks about entire mailbox being wiped right?
I don't use gmail too, I choose to pay for the mail service so someone will feel responsible for backups, reliability instead of data mining my personal messages.
To the cloud! ...oh wait a sec.
As MS got absolutely nothing to offer on Cloud (once you filter PR mess), perhaps they try to make people lose trust to cloud services? ;)
I have all my emails backed up in a 4GB .pst!
... do it yourself.
A vanity domain name, a VPS hosting an ubuntu instance running postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, roundcube, denyhosts and duplicity backup to some rsync.net space.
Yes it costs money, but I control the whitelists, the filtering, the retention and the backups. It's a small price to pay. I wouldn't expect my grandmother to set up something similar, but I can host extra mailboxes if need be. It's not that hard to do if you've been running linux for a couple of years. Set it up and forward a copy of your email from your current provider for a few months until you feel comfortable with your set up.
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
Just logged into my (throwaway) Hotmail for the first time in a month and sure enough, all 1,625 spam messages are still in my inbox. (And only 25 spam messages in the Junk folder.)
"Users can still log in without issue."
Remarkably, this is still a nonsensical statement. "Sans issue" or "without issue" is commonly seen in the phrase "died without issue" in which it refers to dying without siring or bearing children. Used as an uncountable noun, issue refers to one's offspring. As a countable noun, issue may refer to technical problems. The error here is with "issue" not "sans."
"Users can still log in without issues." means that users can log in without any problems.
"Users can still log in without issue." or "Users can still log in sans issue." means that users are still not required to have children before they can log in.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
well now. despite all the histeria. This sounds very much like what's known in the business as an Exchange dial tone recovery. what does this mean? well look it up before commenting recklessly. but I'll provide a synopsis quickly simply, the underlying Microsoft Exchange datastore (hierarchical jet based database) has had some sort of data loss or corruption. The easiest way to maintain continuity of service in this scenario is to allow the user to access an empty mailbox and then restore the underlying data as soon as feasible. this is what is going on. Once a dial tone restore has been completed the data restore is done over a longer period of time. It's called best practice in the event of a large data failure. I'm no MS fanboi. From someone that knows, and I really know about exchange (vastly better than the majority of MS employed Exchange engineers)... it seems like they doing the best things under the situation in are in.
Hotmail is offered as a free service. What do you expect?
Isn't it amazing how a company (Microsoft) can blatantly rub the noses of their customers in a "we dont care about you" attitude repeatedly and over decades.
They never innovate. They are often years late to market with dull "me too" products that are always more buggy, more limited, less secure, less interoperable and harder-to-use versions of other existing products, and yet even though there are much better alternatives available, even free ones, many if not most indviduals and even big businesses amazingly still actively choose Microsoft products and services for their infrastructure even at inflated prices.
It totally blows my mind why this is the case.
The last time I paid for email, it sucked nearly as bad as Yahoo (which was total crap at the time). Gmail might be free, but so far it's better than anything else I tried, including paid.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Havent had to use the shoddy interface in a long time.
How much of a fancy interface does one need to send and receive an e-mail? Honestly, there are some of us who don't need anything more than "login and there it is", so it doesn't really matter in the end what/where we use. I have had a hotmail account since late 96/early 97 (friends who have to register there or elsewhere as "joesmith8948908908903290" or whatnot express awe at my 4-character user name), and for what I want it to do, it works fine.
"Windows Live 2011" is what Azure, a real neat idea has become. Sad but true.