Hotmail was my second email account ever. Right after the nearly unused college email we got while taking that experimental English writing class (we used Macs, ~1993) While working for Amarillo College for the summer, I saw the students all making their own email accounts on this thing called Hotmail or HoTMaiL, at the time. Over the years is has changed dramatically. MS bought them in the dot com boom. Spam became a bane of online existence. Yahoo, Google, and everyone else added free email. AOL, MS, Google and everyone else copied IRC and added chat. Size limits went from 1 meg to 2 meg to.. I don’t know, way more than I would ever use. MS tried to get rid of the Hotmail brand. Then changed their mind and slapped the the endless Microsoft Live Hotmail name on it. The UI changed to match Outlook 2003 in a web page. Awesome.
I stuck with my original purpose. Email I can access from anywhere; home, Grandma’s house, work, etc. All the bells and whistles are pretty meaningless, except for the space. Now, I don’t have to clean out my inbox.
The past 18 months have made it tough to stick with Hotmail. First, the switch or switch off their spam filter and I got flooded. That lasted 6 months. They still let obviously spammy picture emails in. Then they force upgraded to the “better” interface. They tried to kill the Hotmail name, which indicates how little they know about their own brand.
None of that affects functionality in a major way. But then I started noticing not all emails sent to me got through. I contacted the sender’s ISP, also my ISP, and they blamed it on MS. Besides that instance it seemed other expected emails didn’t come in. This is very disturbing. A free email account that doesn’t recieve emails is worse than worthless.
A few weeks ago I watched the person in the next cube checking her Yahoo account. I could believe it. The screen refreshed in ~5 seconds. I have to wait 30 seconds miniumum and sometimes it never comes up or renders wrong. And this is with ad blocking turn on. Does it take a full minute to load over a T3 with ads? One things for sure. It’s never fast.
Today, I tried to send a Thanksgiving and got the screenshot below, “The server is too busy.” Are you freaking kidding me? Now, I can send emails when I want to. What if I had been on a wireless link at a coffee shop and couldn’t hang around for MS to get their act together? It may be time to cut the cord. This is getting absolutely ridiculous. Perhaps, it’s now worth the pain of changing a 9 year old email account. Thank God, I never opted to pay for this.
I will try to send this rant to Tech Support at Hotmail. Assuming I can find a link. It not, just add it to the list of aweful consumer service providers.