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Has_Hotmail_Frozen
| Has Hotmail Frozen?
Has Hotmail Frozen?
Hotmail has descended slowly, without note, into a state of
completely unuseability. The problems are with accessing
messages, sending emails, and the dreaded blue screen of email
death: "The Server Is Too Busy". Hey Gates, I know you're a busy
guy, but can't you even make servers that have time to talk to
me?
There are spattered posts in assorted newsgroups with theories
as to the possible causes of Hotmail's problems. They range from
1) a recent merger with Sympatico, to the 2) recent increase in
mailbox storage size or to 3) Hotmail being spammed to death.
Let's deal with each one in turn: 1) Sure Hotmail did merge with
Sympatico, but so what? Why would that destroy mail
functionality? Shouldn't that mean *more* resources, not less?
2) As for the increase in mailbox size, perhaps Microsoft has
bitten off more than it can chew. Being a software architect, I
understand that it's quite easy to design systems that don't
scale well. Perhaps Microsoft's capitalistic business model of
small email boxes with a fee for a slightly larger one led to an
architecture that doesn't hold water in the free love of storage
world. Microsoft faces stiff competition from Yahoo mail which
offers 250 megabytes and GMail (by Google) which offers a
luxurious 1 gigabyte of storage. This competition forced them to
ratchet up their alloted email inbox sizes from a miserly 1
megabyte to 250 megabytes. This 250 time increase, across a wide
user base in very short order is very likely the cause of our
current woes.
3) Finally, Spam, the bane of email everywhere. Hotmail has made
some attempts at handling spam, but they're not quite there yet.
Hotmail puts suspected spam email into the junk mail folder. But
how does Hotmail basuspect them as spam in the first place? The
first time a spam sender sends out a message to many hotmail
users, the email is delivered into their inboxes. Users then
have to report this email as spam before hotmail even knows the
message is spam. By that time the damage is already done.
Hundreds or thousands of users have opened that message, bogging
down the hotmail servers. Spam senders are also, much smarter
than Hotmails filters and simply change words and graphics here
and there to appear to be a completely different message. The
correct behaviour ought to be, put all messages not in the
user's contact list automatically into junk mail. Then the user
can remove any messages that weren't junk by adding those people
to their contacts list. A convenience would be a display of all
addresses in the junk folder that tried to contact you with a
brief subject line. This pane would have a simple check box and
submit button to allow you to import that person into your
contact list.
In the interim, while the software gods jostle for market share
supremacy, what are we mere users to do? We really have very
little choice. I will email this article to my editor using
Gmail, simply because Hotmail is broken. Perhaps our collective
use of other web mail providers will light a fire under the
Hotmail architects and we can have a workeable solution to this
problem soon.
About the author:
Martin Winer is a computer scientist developing
http://www.rankyouragent.com which is a forum for ranking real
estate professionals.
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