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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.'"
Maybe they finally tried to switch Hotmail over to Windows NT...
No sig today...
Besides, isn't it called something terrible these days like "Windows Live Hotmail"?
Well apparently with this new "upgrade" they're changing the name to Windows Dead Hotmail.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Although I also prefer Gmail, you're being extremely naive if you think any remotely hosted and controlled service is immune to issues of this nature. This should be as good a reminder as any for all of us to set up local backups for our email services.
On that note, does anyone have any recommendations for backup software/file formats? I seem to remember that last time I looked into the issue there seemed to be some lack of standardisation when looking for an open 'email archive' format to use.
"MS's Hotmail specifically says they're not responsible for loss of data"
Whereas the likely truth is that they _are_ responsible for loss of data, but they don't _accept_ responsibility.
Of course. sans = Storage Area NetworkS, which is obviously where the author thinks the problem lies.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
Although I agree that users should have backups in place (and, as I mentioned in another post, any suggestions for a simple bit of cross-platform software that archives into an open format would be helpful), simply saying "It's free, you have no right to bitch" is disingenuous. Yes, in an ideal world one should have a signed contract laying out their precise rights, and yes, any normal free email account has an EULA that basically says "We are not responsible if our service breaks into your house, tars and feathers your spouse, and paints your dog blue", but that does not instantly absolve them from all responsibility in the eyes of their users, wherever they may stand legally. To a reasonable person, there is an expectation of reliability even in a free email service - even if a class action suit wouldn't have a leg to stand on, there's still the (often equally powerful) court of public opinion to deal with.
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.
Windows Active Live Visual Hotmail .Net 7 Personal Edition
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
I do trust Gmail to have better data integrity because they are more open about their architecture and having read about it, I think it's well designed.
I don't have any expectation of them caring about my email apart from its data-mining value though.
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.
use gmail, then use thunderbird to dl (without deleting from server) and something like mozbackup
rewriting history since 2109
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.
"I use crowd based storage."
I tried that for my beer. It didn't work out.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Personally, I like Mailstore Home when I'm using Windows. It's convenient, backs up only unique emails and allows for convenient archive. With the ability to search for and restore individual emails as well.
How many "nines" did Microsoft promise with their supposed reliability?
Zero for non-paid accounts. There is no SLA for free accounts, same as with gmail.
Anyway, this was not a technology failure, but the result of a Hotmail's inactivity policy. Which is clearly described on their site.
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.
To the cloud! ...oh wait a sec.
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
Exactly. I would never use any web-based email service which didn't support pop/imap.
If your emails are important, it's simply stupid to rely on an external service to whom your account's integrity is of little consequence. Nothing beats having a local copy and doing your own backups.
Speaking of backups, there was a short period of time when the average person was just starting to get the idea of doing regular backups of their info (it's unbelievable that no OS I've seen has an intelligent backup service). But now we're seeing web services for frickin everything (so they can sell our lives to advertisers) and the average person is going to get *less* computer literate, not more.