Why I love hotmail…
OK, I'll admit a degree of loyalty having owned my hotmail email address since 1996 – Ive known it longer than my wife (9 years) – but it's not the real reason why I keep using it. A recent survey from London suggests that 9/10 emails are now spam – Yes kind sir please excuse this unsolicited communication from the daughter of the former. now dead ruler of Namibia, it is true! However, over the last two years the daily onslaught of messages touting enlargement or medication thereof has dwindled to a point where it is almost non existent. Heaven forbid am I about to praise Microsoft? Yes I am, and justifiably so. I get a degree of flack from my esteemed technical colleagues for continuing to use it. Amusingly, the system they prefer me to use (presumably so they can read my email and laugh at my conversations with the children of Namibian despots) sends me more spam warnings then I get from Bill's system. Go figure as they say in this glorious land. I love hotmail, I love it's reliability, I trust it, it's part of my identity and I have no plans to change from it. Oh and just for the record, I owned my hotmail account long before Bill bought it out. Pity he stopped buying competitors… off to google the details of this daughter that keeps emailing me.
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1) Hotmail’s spam filtering is so good because MSR has some of the world’s best researchers working on it. (I know this because they were right down the hall from me when I was on sabbatical there. Joshua Goodman is da bomb.)
2) Microsoft still buys competitors on a regular basis.
See http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/acquisitions_an.php
I used to be a Hotmail fan until the spam started pouring in. Then just out of curiosity, I created an account and didn’t touch it or use it for 3 months. When I logged in 3 months later, it was full of spam. This only led me to believe the Microsoft was selling it out, because it was not an obvious address.
I bounced over to Yahoo and now that has started to pile up, so I got a Gmail account which does a fairly good job. The key feature that I think Gmail has over everyone else (at least at the moment), is that you can have infinite e-mail address by inserting a + before the @ like so:
kevinsweeney+neilhair@gmail.com
Now if I get any spam in my inbox, I know where they got me e-mail address from and can block any e-mails sent to that address and/or yell at you
well spam or no spam its not as convenient to use as Gmail.
Kevin-
Agreed. That’s a killer GMail feature. I also like the GMail interface a lot more than the Hotmail interface.
As to the spam you got at your Hotmail address, the way that works is through bots that randomize addresses @hotmail.com, then make note of the ones that *don’t* generated a bounce. Those go onto lists that are then sold.
(That process becomes more obvious when you own a domain, and have a catch-all address for non-designated addresses at that domain; I can’t begin to tell you how many emails I get to blahblahblah @ mamamusings.net, where blahblahblah is randomized bizarre strings. And since none of those generate bounces, they then get propagated.
)
I’ve had a hotmail account about as long as you (long before MSFT bought it), and while the spam filtering may have recently improved…why does it still take 20 minutes to receive a message? Gmail is instantaneous. That’s my current gripe with hotmail.
There’s an easy answer to that question, Josh: scale.
Hotmail has an order of magnitude more users than GMail, and along with that, an order of magnitude more traffic (and spam) to process.
As GMail scales, it may well have similar problems.