sweet hotmail revenge

Hotmail was always the absolute worst at dealing with spam. One would think that the MS powerhouse would do something about it, but nah… they didn’t. I’ve had a Hotmail account for a long time but it was so plagued with spam that about a year ago I moved to mail.com using their engineer.com domain (I payed them, btw!)

MS Hotmail strategy was to digitally strangle people into paying for a bigger/better account. First, they deleted the account after 30 days of inactivity (it would never expire if you pay.) Second, they had a measly 2MB allowance (which was the lowest of any other provider, ever.) And to milk that cow dry, they allowed a steady stream of spam to fill your account within a day, so that your legitimate emails bounce. I seriously doubt that reducing spam was a real goal there. They also banked on the fact that switching emails is not a pleasant thing to do.

Every few months, surly after an outcry, there was some news flash that Hotmail (still a big player in web based email) deployed a new filter scheme that will eliminate spam for good. I have to admit that there was a noticable dip in spam flow for a few days; but it came back with a vengeance after the spammers figured out the hooks and increased their yield for good measure, just to teach everyone a lesson.

But the party was over when a new sheriff came to town with 1GB mailbox, followed by Yahoo with 250MB, and finally (and I assume reluctantly, because it did take them a few months) Hotmail with 250MB. So my revenge? I don’t delete a single spam bit on my Hotmail account. Ever. Sure, I’m a drop in the sea, but it makes me feel better, OK? In my dreams, I am clogging their RAIDs with their own junk that they should have needed to filter out to begin-with. Wouldn’t you want to have that dream? Just open a Hotmail account, they’re FREE!

_{P.S.: Personally, I don’t like MS bashing for the sake of bashing. They are a business, and they do what businesses do. If you don’t like them, don’t use them; that’s the beautiful part of capitalism (more OS choices these days sure helps.) In the above case, however, I think it was a pretty low strategy and I chose to rant about it.}