Does Anyone Actually Use Hotmail Anymore?
Oye, I’m verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves… I’ll give you a topic:
MSN Hotmail is niether hot nor mail. Discuss.
This afternoon, out of the clear blue nowhere, I thought about my now defunct Hotmail account. It worked fine, I suppose, though it served up loads of pointless ads, spam, and lost the occasional mail. It was tolerable – for the four years or so that I used it – before I unceremoniously abandoned it in favor of a lightweight, no bullshit Gmail account.
I am guessing that Microsoft really took a hit on that one; but even as I reactivated my “reserved” account, I was forced to wade through three full pages of pointless advertising. Do people still put up with that crap? I'm wondering aloud what the strategy is here, besides what seems to be a declaration of uncle to Google. Maybe they're just saying to themselves “Oh, screw free email, we'll just gouge the shit out of 'em with Vista.” ◊
21 Missives So Far
01 Malnurtured Snay said on Fri Sep 9 23:22:44 EDT
I use Hotmail -- I get less spam at it then I was with my now-defunct "Snay@MalnurturedSnay.net" address, and most of the spam I do get it routed to the "junk" folder.
03 Gone Away said on Sat Sep 10 8:34:36 EDT
Ah, now I get it. This was just a sneaky way to get rid of a few more Gmail accounts, wasn't it, Josh? ;)
04 Andrew Kaufmann said on Sat Sep 10 9:48:03 EDT
I still have a hotmail account -- it's my official "this site requires an email confirmation grrr" account. About once a month when I'm really really really really bored I go through and read some of the volumes of spam. It's good solid fun.
05 Malnurtured Snay said on Sat Sep 10 10:46:17 EDT
Thanks, but I do have a gmail account as well. ;)
06 josh said on Sat Sep 10 13:57:13 EDT
Oh no, Gone, it's way too late for that. I think all of us who use Gmail--though big fans of its features--have come to the realization that those invites are a harder sell than the proverbial snow to an Eskimo. Like copies of William Shatner's records, you can't even give them away. But you know me, ever the optimist. Right.
07 melly said on Sun Sep 11 0:36:40 EDT
I've been using Yahoo! for about 10 years now, give or take, and it always served me well. Got nothing to say against, only good things really.
My ISP is working with Hotmail, so when I'm away I get my mail through Hotmail, and I really don't like it. It's slow on the load, and just slow in general and I have to go through 2 log-in pages. Why???
I'm only sorry I didn't start a separate email account for my blog.
I know nothing about Gmail except what I heard when it first launched about the big-brother. I immediately checked the Yahoo! terms - same thing.
Why do you need to give away Gmail accounts? What's that all about?
Oooops, sorry for the long comment.
08 freak2532 said on Sun Sep 11 4:20:54 EDT
melly, Gmail is in beta and at one time was invite only. Meaning a select few were given invites at the start and its basically grew. However a while back every Gmail user got about 100 invites to give away. However, most of the time after a day or two the 100 was there again. Gmail is still in beta however its now open for all to sign-up(or at least those who have cell phones).
09 josh said on Sun Sep 11 4:57:32 EDT
Melly, the big brother stuff was a bit of a red herring, really. No doubt started by *ahem* other web mail services.
About Gmail though, it really is an excellent web application -- impeccable interface design with usability at the heart of every method. There's something else you can't beat with a stick; if memory serves, there is one (1) image on any given page -- and its a 120x100 Gmail logo. Of course the massive amount of truly brilliant scripting involved adds weight, but not enough that you'd notice.
My brother (yes you Bill) was a bit of a Hotmail zealot for years and years, until he finally accepted my third invite (he trashed the first two because he is also trigger happy vis-a-vis spam, something that happens to you when you use hotmail for a long time) and now he swears by it, just like me.
If you'd like an account let me or anyone else you see with an @gmail address know, I and every other Gmail user would be glad to oblige. The invite campaign was brilliant, if you think about it. It's a great mail service, so after you get into it you want to to spread the lurve, and once you get 100 invites, you wanna get rid of those pesky things.
Huzzah! Your "long comment" doesn't seem so long anymore, does it? :)
11 wheat said on Sun Sep 11 20:03:25 EDT
Gmail and my priviate email through wheatdesign.com (currently POP3 through Thunderbird, though IMAP is also supported). I do find myself using Gmail more and more. And I definately use it for passing big files around or anytime someone needs to send me a big attachment. I used to have a yahoo account. And I still use My Yahoo to check movie listings and stuff like that. But they turned off my email due to inactivity and I never turned it back on. I once had to sign up for a MS Passport and that was true hell. I think I did have a hotmail account at one time (had to get one to use MSM or something). But then I discovered Trillian (and now Google Talk).
12 Mad said on Mon Sep 12 4:48:01 EDT
Hotmail is the webmail of Satan, normal webmail is kind of kewl when you think about it, Gmail is just fantastic but the thing I really grooved on was when I bought my own domain and hosting; I could give out mail boxes with web mail interfaces and POP access! I felt like "I AM GMAIL!"
Umm do you want a gmail account?
13 melly said on Mon Sep 12 11:46:46 EDT
Thanks Freak2532 and Josh.
Josh, if you could set me up with a Gmail account, that would be mighty kind of you. Maybe I could use that for all my blog stuff. I was about to start another Yahoo account fot that, but Gmail sounds good and now I'm curious.
TIA.
14 Ben Deez said on Mon Sep 12 14:15:42 EDT
I like it a lot!
15 anonymouscoworker said on Mon Sep 12 15:24:41 EDT
Gmail has been a godsend. Though my old juno account has never EVER been spammed and I've had it since 97 or 98. That's pretty good.
16 josh said on Mon Sep 12 18:02:52 EDT
No shit? That's a record for sure. And here I was thinking they spend all of that 10 clams/month on peddling that lame ass snake-oily hoax called "internet accelerator".
17 melly said on Mon Sep 12 21:27:19 EDT
Josh, may I ask you a question about hotlinking? I really don't want to be that word you mentioned up there.
If something (an image) is under creative commons license and I can use it, should I still not 'hotlink'? And what if it's from Flickr?
Hope you don't mind me asking, oh wise one.
18 josh said on Mon Sep 12 23:44:58 EDT
Hey Melly. I knew I was gonna be asked to 'splain myself sooner or later; that whole f-tard thing was a bit of an overreaction when I found out how often people were hotlinking some of my fairly worthless images, so here I go.
The problem with 'hotlinking' is not necessarily a copyright issue—actually, everything on this site is explicitly licensed under the Gnu GPL, which makes it even more open than most CC license variants, and anyone who ever emailed me asking for the source code to the blog or even the images would probably get what they asked for without much hullabaloo from me.
The real issue is the bandwidth it takes to serve the images to their page; if they are using a direct link to my server, well, they are ostensibly usurping my transfer without my permission, and insofar as inter-site etiquette exists, that's just not cricket.
For instance, I looked at my logs one day and realized that the same image had been served to some guy's myspace site 40+ times in one day. Now, if I was actually paying for my hosting like normal people (another story altogether), this could be a problem. If that same guy decided to hotlink a smaller image of mine on his index page that was hrmm, say 100KB, and one day he ended up with exclusive video of Dubya snorting cocaine in 1974, the millions of visits to his page would end up costing me beaucoup bandwidth that, theoretically speaking, I'd be paying for.
As far as Flickr is concerned - I'm sure it exists in their policies that directly linking to photos from their site must be through approved methods, like those Flickr doodads people add to their pages, or perhaps they don't care at all because of the sheer volume of linking they contend with. They are in the image-serving bitness, afterall–I'm sure you're fine.
I realized while typing this that people who read my feed with an RSS reader will be getting that image, so I plan to modify the url magic that makes it happen to serve a more becoming image.
Thanks for the question -- I hope I made it clear enough. :)
19 josh said on Tue Sep 13 0:41:49 EDT
Okay, I put my crack staff of monkeys on typewriters to work, and this is what they came up with:
Market research is telling me that most hotlinkers, by some odd coincidence, are subscribers to Cat Fancy. I hope this drives home the point better than the finger.
21 melly said on Tue Sep 13 12:57:56 EDT
I did my homework and found this on Flickr:
"The Flickr service makes it possible to post images hosted on Flickr to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display images hosted on flickr.com must provide a link back to Flickr from each photo to its photo page on Flickr."
So I'm not a fucktard (I was just being a prude b4).
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