Microsoft chasing GMail?

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » July 4, 2004, 10:12 pm

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Kriista · Post by **Kriista** » July 4, 2004, 10:23 pm

yahoo has done the same thing, seems the bar has been raised on free email

kyoukan · Post by **kyoukan** » July 4, 2004, 11:15 pm

yeah after nearly a decade of slowly taking away all the features and priviledges, another company is making them give it all back.

it's too late for hotmail though. it's almost impossible to sign up as a new user unless you want your address to be Cjwi385_skf49bW-fjuY@hotmail.com

and you'll still get spam by the second day.

Dups. · Post by **Dups.** » July 5, 2004, 8:46 am

I've kept my hotmail account alive because I want to see just how much spam a day I can get.

it's quite incredible. Of course my account is nearing a decade of existance.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » July 5, 2004, 10:15 am

I don't think MS was selling their account list to spammers since they took over.. I've had a hotmail account for 3 years and never get spam in it.. of course, I have a spam bait account elsewhere that I sign up for web pages with that gets thousands a month =)

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » July 5, 2004, 1:25 pm

I created a hotmail account about 6 months ago. It didn't take long to fill up. If they're not selling it someone is pretty good at guessing addresses. The main thing that's annoying about hotmail is having to log in every 60 days or whatever it is. Since I don't use it as my primary email I always forget to check it until it's to late. Although I can see why they would do that. No sense holding thousands of spam messages for someone who isn't coming back.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » July 5, 2004, 4:46 pm

Aslanna wrote:I created a hotmail account about 6 months ago. It didn't take long to fill up. If they're not selling it someone is pretty good at guessing addresses. The main thing that's annoying about hotmail is having to log in every 60 days or whatever it is. Since I don't use it as my primary email I always forget to check it until it's to late. Although I can see why they would do that. No sense holding thousands of spam messages for someone who isn't coming back.

Hotmail accounts seem to stay active if you at least use the IM part of the email. I've got a hotmail I never check and have only received 4 emails directly from microsoft since opening it like 3 months ago.

Remember, most spam comes from whatever you use that email address for. If it's used to register for message boards on the net, forget it, your email is toast and will be all over the place. Also, your email gets compromised by people you forward jokes etc to along with the string of email addresses attached to them. Eventually one of those people will spam the joke and your email address to a public site or board.

I warn any friends or family I know that aren't computer savvy etc about this as I don't want my primary email address distributed all over the place.

To summarize, my hotmail account has a total of 4 messages in it that I opened because I had to for a messenger account. Another email account I opened to register for betas, message boards, etc has tons and tons of spam that I clear out once a week.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » July 5, 2004, 6:22 pm

Remember, most spam comes from whatever you use that email address for.

The point is I never gave it out or used it to register anything. Either way I don't care. Yahoo is better for me. I can create disposable email addresses on the fly and give those out instead.

Down with Hotmail! It was better before MS bought it. Or whatever they did.

Galdraith EQ · Post by **Galdraith EQ** » July 5, 2004, 6:59 pm

Send me a PM if anyone wants a Gmail account. They are by invitation only during the Beta, but existing users periodically get invites to give out. My wife works at Google so she has maybe 100 invites lying around.

All I need is first name, last name and email account. I'll send invites as I get them (or as I can bug my wife to send them) so it might be a while until you get yours!

I encourage you to get one, it is so much better than any other webmail out there, and not just because of the storage, the interface is amazing

Sionistic · Post by **Sionistic** » July 5, 2004, 8:43 pm

why do you need my first and last name?

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » July 5, 2004, 8:57 pm

Sionistic wrote:why do you need my first and last name?

Know much about Scientology?

It's best to do what they ask and not raise too many questions.

Mak · Post by **Mak** » July 5, 2004, 10:03 pm

For once, I totally agree with Aslanna. Yahoo! > Hotmail.

Yahoo spam filters are great, you can create disposable addresses with ease, I get 2GB of space, and I can even check/send from my POP3 accounts with it.

Galdraith EQ · Post by **Galdraith EQ** » July 5, 2004, 10:09 pm

The form to send an invite has 3 fields in it: First name, Last name, email address.

I have no idea why they ask for them, i imagine one of the reasons is to prevent too many spammers from signing up, but that is just me speculating.

I personally don't give a rat's ass about your name

Durew · Post by **Durew** » July 6, 2004, 1:14 am

I've had the same hotmail address for over 10 years now and I'm only 22 lol.. its insane the amount of crap email that goes through there. About 3 years ago when it started to get really bad I set the filter to Exclusive and just monitored the junk email folder for a few months to get everyone added to my address list

Bubba Grizz · Post by **Bubba Grizz** » July 6, 2004, 10:40 am

Yahoo mail isn't all that much better. I keep my account open so I can use it when I have to add an email field(not for porn sites either amazingly enough). I let the spam build up but it seemed to level off at around 3k messages before the autodelete feature starts to kick in for my bulk mail folder.