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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Friday, April 07, 2006

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Microsoft Hotmail We Suck?

A few weeks ago, Tom Raftery posted about his recent experiences with Hotmail in a post titled “Microsoft Hotmail, you suck!”

Tom states:

“Why am I annoyed? - Microsoft’s insistence that you have to log into Hotmail every 30 days or they delete all your info. I don’t use Hotmail much, but I have had my Hotmail account for years and there was tons of old email info in there. I logged in today (after obviously more than 30 days) and I find all my info has been deleted by Microsoft.”

…

“Why impose such a shortsighted policy of deleting people’s info after 30 days when your main competitors (Yahoo! and Gmail) don’t have any such policies as far as I know.”

Well everyone has some kind of policy. It just so happens that ours is really not ideal for so many reasons. This has been a constant pain point for our customers, and a problem that most of us working at Hotmail today simply inherited.

Is it acceptable? No. I apologized to Tom on his blog, but the reality is, we’ve lost Tom as a customer forever. Do I feel responsible in some way? Yes.

This policy is something many folks on my team have been working to address. It’s just one of many things about our service we are attempting to change. I’ll blog about some more changes coming pretty soon, but I would like to say that we have changed the policy for Windows Live Mail accounts to 120 day expiration. It’s not forever, but the reality is it cannot be forever (unless you are a premium user and pay a subscription). There are really valid business reasons for this.

Anyway, I’m glad we’ve made this change for Windows Live Mail user. As we migrate our user base to WLM everyone will benefit from the extended expiration times for accounts. For folks in many developing nations, as well as students who might not check their accounts in the summer, 120 days should protect their accounts much better than 30 days.

I just sent Tom a Windows Live Mail Invite to fix his storage issue and hopefully the expiration issue if he still cares to use the service. Sorry Tom!

Hotmail | Windows Live
Posted Saturday, April 08, 2006    Permalink    Comments [7]  View blog reactions

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Friday, April 07, 2006 10:01:37 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
You know my BIGGEST dislike in Windows Live Mail? (I'm a beta user) I can't stand how large the ads are on the right hand side of the screen. They are so big that they seriously eat up precious real estate for the actual message area. I find that I have to scroll horizontally to read some of my messages. Maybe I've just gotten so used to the unobtrusive ads in Gmail that when I use my hotmail acct, I find it to be rather obnoxious (the ads). Anyway, just thought I'd quickly voice my displeasure since you had done such a great job of addressing the other retention issue.

I enjoy reading your blog! Please don't take my ad criticism as anything other than some constructive criticism. And, yes, I know. I'm not paying for the hotmail service so I really don't have much room to complain. :)
Hazzard
Friday, April 07, 2006 11:06:42 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Ooh, something tells me, Omar's got some good news for Jeff.
Jud
Saturday, April 08, 2006 7:42:47 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
So here's my question...does Hotmail send out say, an automated "two minute warning"? When you sign up, does it ask for say, another email address (if it exists) so it can notify you about such things? (Obviously, I'm not a hotmail user. I'm at 9 various email accounts now, and I swore I'd never have ten)

If not, that may not be a bad thing to implement for Windows Live Mail as you convert hotmail users over. If someone doesn't have a second email address, well there's nothing you can really do then, but if they do, an automated "Hey, if you don't log in by (date), we're going to assume you don't want your account anymore, and delete everything" message could be a way to help prevent at least *some* of this from happening.

Just a thot.
John C. Welch
Sunday, April 09, 2006 1:42:12 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
The 30 day policy is one thing my dad in particular never liked. He knows tons of people overseas who for some reason or another can't check their e-mail for periods of over 30 days so it's terrible to have their accounts deleted.

I understand the need for some poclicy like this since with over 200 million active accounts it just costs too much to have accounts sitting around that people don't use. The 4 months period in WLMail is a good move.
Samuel
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 6:33:45 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I always figured there was a good business case for the 30 day limit. What lost me as a customer was when my wife signed up for the enhanced hotmail service - the one that can include 3 or 4 family members as well - only to find out after that we could not migrate my account to her service unless we used msn . It was really lame that this was not part of the limitaions stated in the advertisement and that my existing account could not be migrated. I just don't get how this service was sold with this sort of limitation, I expect this in Beta but not a paid service.
Jim
Sunday, April 23, 2006 2:16:47 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

I've always liked Hotmail, it's always been very handy to have, there are many postives associated with the product.
It's very easy to logon to, intregrates very nicely with MSN Messenger (if you choose to use it) and doesn't require you to fork money out unless you need a permanent account and you don't check your emails regularly.
But...other services do let you have a permanent account for free (such as yahoo) with generous limits and are very generous with email hosting space.
G-Mail is great but it doesn't give you much as far as privacy goes...
I'd like to stay a hotmail customer but i'm finding it doesn't intergrate very well with non-msn email clients,
even with software that allows you to download it into your client.
I think this a recent change for Hotmail to try and prevent non microsoft clients downloading from the service.
With the level of competion and the advantages that other web mail providers offer, it seem strange that microsoft would take this road.

The time extension on hotmail is great, it shows that microsoft do listen from time to time but i suppose if the company isn't generous enough to allow the download of emails to a different email client (one of my own choice) i see no need to be generous enough to upgrade to a premium service, especially when other services will allow you to have both an unlimited time for keeping your account and allow the email client of your choice to be used in conjuction with it.

I personally think Microsoft is an excellent company,
i generally like the options the company provides through it's software, but inlight of having better options else where which don't stiffle your use of the product, it's a little hard to refuse the better offer....

Cheers

Bobski




Bobski
Thursday, July 31, 2008 11:53:52 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Another obnoxious feature of hotmail is ads appearing when re entering hotmail from another browser window. I consider any advertising that I did not ask for to be malicious and obnoxious and I try not to do business with companies that engage in this kind of advertising.
j davis
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