OT: Hotmail (Was: Forums)

[Voltage Spike]

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On Thursday 04 July 2002 11:07, tickticker wrote:
> i've been using hotmail long before it was bought by M$, and still do.  I!
> also! use! yahoo!mail!(a little Register humor there).  I was not insulted.

I just thought I would share my experience with Hotmail.  I, too, signed up 
for Hotmail before they were a part of Microsoft (the second day of service, 
actually ;-) ).  I had no complaints, and they worked great at the time.

However, after Microsoft bought them, I started running into problems.  It 
started with large periods of system downtime.  Then, just my e-mail account 
would be shut down for about an hour while they "read my account for evidence 
of malicious activity".  I found this rather unusual, but the only e-mail I 
received was from my family (at the time, I applauded Hotmail for completely 
filtering spam) and I ignored the inconvenient scans.  (Hey, the service was 
free.  Who was I to complain?)

Eventually, I logged into my account to receive a message stating that my 
account had been permanently closed at the request of a company who suspected 
me of using the account for malicious purposes.  I was quite upset at this 
discovery, so I promptly sent off a message to their support using an 
alternate account and calmly explained the situation.  When I finally 
received a response (about 3 days later), it was an automated form telling me 
that I should my questions to the appropriate department and included a list 
of all 750 (approximately) of them.  Surprise, surprise!  Not a single 
department matched my complaint.  After that, I simply gave up.  I found 
someone else and vowed never to touch Hotmail again (even if only to increase 
the burden on Microsoft ;-) ).

Anyways, that's my rant.  I guess the lesson is that while things may seem bad 
(2 Mb limit!), they can always get worse.  As Dr. G put it, "Hotmail is the 
Devil".

- -- 
						Voltage Spike
      ,,,
     (. .)
- --ooO-(_)-Ooo--
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