Ordinary Nothing

Recently the spam messages reaching Hotmail accounts turned into large messages with large attachments (100k-350k).

I know this isn’t only my problem, since when mentioning this to other people with Hotmail accounts, they knew about the large spam messages straight away.

And it definitely has something to do with Hotmail, since my other email accounts (of which I have far too many already) don’t get these sort. Other sorts of spam, yes, sure, but not these ones.

Their spam filter does catch all these messages, and transfer them to the Junk folder. But unlike some other email providers, their junk folder counts toward the account limit.For a mailbox size of 2MB (Since I don’t live in the right places), this means that it’s quite possible to leave an empty mailbox, and come back a day later to find out you maxed out… Not fun.

In any case, in the automatic message sent, notifying me that I maxed the account, they gave an email address for questions. So I decided to ask about that. The process is interesting, you start by sending an empty message (or not, I didn’t pay attention to that as first, since it’s so uncustomary), and they send you a link to a page where you can fill the comment/suggestion/complaints…

So, I sent a message about it. The women answering said several things (apart from the excessive formal politeness):

• She will pass it over to the development team.
• I can set my junk filter to automatically delete messages.
• They intend to convert everyone to 250MB mailboxes. They do it in batches, so it will take time, but they will.
• The message came with a notice (inserted inside the text, like it was a personal message) that I can upgrade for a paid account to get eight times my current account size.

Which is all fine and good, except that I still may lose messages until then. They say that there are five days grace period until the actively delete messages, but they may bounce incoming messages even during that time.

And the junk filter is far from perfect. So it’s lose message if it doesn’t delete, and lose messages if it does.

The idea of paying for 8 times my account (That would be 16MB), on the same message telling me I’m going to get a lot more for free, is especially ludicrous.

So I sent back a reply with these concerns. And got a reply back from a different person, saying basically the same things, and including similar commercials inlined in the personal message. I was impressed by how much they all really cared deeply about what I had to say, and would give it the utmost priority. Yes, I didn’t take that too seriously either.

But in any case, that’s it. Annoying, but hopefully will improve soon. 

April 25th, 2005 at 2:58 EET | Categories: Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.