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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Friday, January 13, 2006

Hotmail on Slasdot

I'm actually working on writing a post about building to scale. Phil Smoot, the Product Unit Manager for the Hotmail Backend team (they build the systems that store and deliver email), was recently interviewed in an article titled Behind the Scenes at Hotmail and it's now on Slashdot. The comments are quite good and civil :-).

Dare has a few good posts on scaling that I plan on referencing if I ever get around to my post.

"The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture."

...

"Building online services requires more than the ability to sling code and hack databases. Lots of stuff gets written about the more trivial aspects of building an online service (e.g. switch to sexy, new platforms like Ruby on Rails) but the real hard work is often unheralded and rarely discussed"

Dare speaks the truth. Walter Hsueh, one of our lead developers on Windows Live mail outlines some of our recent experiences with AJAX and the .NET Framework 2.0.

 

Friday, January 13, 2006 1:22:55 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
The article is about scaling. Interesting that on many occasions I get the "server is busy" message and I can't continue.

Other problems with Hotmail:

1- Converts hyperlinks to javascript style. This prevents me from right clicking and open in new window *my way*. Hotmail should not mess with the html in the messages that i receive to suit their purposes.

2- Too many false positives for spam and I see no reason why. The sender looks legit. The recepient (me) looks legit. The body looks legit. Clean text and html in message body. If I have to go through the junk mail folder every time and look for legit messages and click "this is not junk" all the time, why bother with junk vs good mail folders and spam filters?

3- Too many links, ads and junk on the front door and inside the mail page. Keep it clean and mail related stuff only like Yahoo Mail and GMail do.

4- Mo free pop3 access like Gmail & Yahoo. While Yahoo Pop3 is not free, there's a program that works like a proxy to it and it's free.

5- Hotmail just feels bloated and slow with all the url switching and gfx heavy pages.

Sorry if I am bitchy about it but i am seriously considering dumping it.

Abdu
abdu
Friday, January 13, 2006 1:25:31 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Why don't you email me your address and I'll send you an invite?
Omar Shahine
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