I saw Hotmail made the news today, so I decided I better make a blog post on my dealings with Hotmail.
My very 1st email address was with Netzero, but after a couple of years it got turned off, so I went to Hotmail, this was probably about 15 years ago. They were my main email provider till about 4-6 years ago when I started using Gmail in force. However even during these last few years I still maintained my Hotmail account until this last spring my account had been hacked into.
I enjoyed Hotmail for many years. It was interesting watching them change their features as the years went by. Initially in the 1st years you were allowed like 20 different filters to filter out spam and other junk mail. Then they downsized it to about 10. However I had all 20 filled and they didn’t remove any of them, but if I tried to change the filters I would lose any I had over 10. I had been changing the filters every 9 months or so to update the newest spam techniques. But when Hotmail made that change I was unable to make any more changes due to not wanting to lose 10 filters. You were allowed more filters but you had to pay for them.
Eventually they did away with that system altogether, and all my filters disappeared. This was probably after 8 years or so.
I also was upset when they began to automatically set your Hotmail account into some social/messaging system. I can’t remember what that was, but it ticked me off, and I think after trying twice to turn off the feature which was defaulted on, despite my wishes, I may have finally gotten it turned off after a year.
It was probably at that time I heard about Gmail. I think Hotmail was offering 200 megabytes at the time, and Gmail was in beta and was offering 1 Gig I think. At the time it was pretty hard getting into Gmail, you had to have an invite, after 3-6 months I finally found someone who sent me an invite. I think I researched it online and may have found someone online to give me the invite, but am not sure, it may have been a co-worker. Though I am 75% certain it was a stranger online I found who sent me the invite.
But Hotmail was losing my interest and I fell in love with Gmail. As a webmaster and a big email person, I was operating about 6 email addresses, so Gmail had more to offer than Hotmail and less pains and problems. So I slowly began using Hotmail less and less.
Probably about 4 years ago, I stared telling my friends and family to use the new Gmail address and not use the Hotmail one. But I still maintained it, and would get a few emails thru Hotmail every so often.
I would say about a year and a half ago, I think I finally told folks I was no longer using Hotmail, and not to use it at all, though I still checked it and still would get an email every month or so.
Then last spring my Hotmail account was hacked into and Hotmail shut it down. I went through the procedure to get it restarted with a new password and Hotmail required I use a cell phone to activate it.
Even though I was 99.99% done with Hotmail, it ticked me off badly, as I didn’t wanna lose my email address I had had for 15 years. And I thought it was evil and wrong to make people be susceptible to cancer just to get their account turned on!
I discuss cell phones and cell towers causing cancer here:
http://kingdomgospel.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/cell-phones-cell-towers/
I spent several hours trying to get my account reactivated and contacting them to tell them how angry I was. I finally found a Microsoft forum where Hotmail and other issues were discussed, but it was a very lame board where little help and even fewer support contacts are made. I left a message there and let it drop.
My Hotmail account had been lost, I was upset by their procedures, and this just angered me enough to say, “Forget Hotmail!”.
Gmail also uses cell phones for authorization, but its only 1 possible method. Not the only method.
Hotmail was and probably is a fairly nice email service, but Gmal just blows them away, and Hotmail has a few too many little things that just rubs me wrong.
