I used to love Hotmail for its convenience, but is it just me or has Hotmail really become sucky lately? Even though they recently gave everybody a large amount of message space (250 MB I think), to compete with Gmail, I've begun to experience numerous problems with the rest of the service.
Problems I've experienced with Hotmail include:
- Service seems very unreliable lately. It feels like they've moved servers or something and they can't support the load of their user base
- In the past, I have sent emails to my family members and friends - they never got them or the emails were delayed by up to one week
- when sending emails, sometimes it will give an error (despite the email being sent). When my brother experienced this, he tried sending it a few times and got errors each time (though I got his email 5 times). Then he reached his daily outgoing limit (which I didn't know existed!) so he can't send any emails today.
- I no longer seem to be able to save a shortcut/bookmark directly to my Inbox, every time I click it, I get my Inbox with zero messages displayed. I then have to log out of MSN, log back in and go to Hotmail. What a major pain in the ass!
- When I log in to Hotmail, I get a "Page Not Found" error in one of the divs off to the left before it finally brings me to my Inbox. Microsoft seems very unprofessional to have let this happen.
I've decided to start the slow migration away from Hotmail to a more reliable form of communication. All in all, Gmail puts Hotmail to shame nowadays. I'm sure that Google has lit a fire under Microsoft (as evidenced by MSN Search surfacing), and we'll see Hotmail improve (the name/brand just has too much cache for Microsoft to drop it). But I'm getting hesitant to rely on any webmail service as they have too wide a user base.
I think you have an HTML error, the list container is mixed with a paragraph tag. … I hate to start a flame, but IMO Yahoo has always been better. Back when limits were smaller Yahoo gave 4MB vs Hotmail’s 2MB. And the most annoying thing: Hotmail doesn’t want you to save sent mail, never an issue with Yahoo. The interface to Hotmail has never been very intuitive. I’m not sure if using IE helps. I’m glad people maybe dumping Hotmail, but I still think Yahoo Mail is a strong competitor (even to Gmail).
Mauriat, thanks for letting me know about the HTML error. It’s those damn google ads, every time I insert one and then save it off, it eats the start of the first HTML tag it sees after it. Not sure if it’s a WordPress problem or what but I inevitably have to fix it after inserting the ad.
I live in Chicago and I’ve been starting to get messages that the Hotmail servers in my area are down. This has rarely happened before. What’s the solution?