Revamp is rather damp (hotmail.com)

Member Name: Cheuk

Product:	hotmail.com
Date:	07/06/01 (133 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Better spam filter, Popular, Easy to access Microsoft services

Disadvantages: Microsoft owned and access to their sites, Slow with Netscape,, Small account size, Someone will proabably overcome the spam filter soon. The spam filter still has problems with genuine mail treated as junk, too popular., Regularly offline, technical problems

Love it or loathe it, Hotmail is the most popular web based email service. True it is regularly slated but the fact it is regularly used suggest something is going right. Well getting a first choice username can be difficult due to the popularity. I myself have several other web based email accounts but find myself still using hotmail as one of my primary accounts. Why? Well one of the reasons is that I can't be bothered emailing my contacts to get them to use my other accounts.


True when I first got my account I subscribed to many of the newsletters, but sadly many of these have now gone defunct.


Recent users and the general public would have experienced the recent revamp of hotmail which didn'e exactly get off to a flying start with hitches apparent. This upgrade apart from switching hotmail to windows servers from linux based one (to ease Microsoft ego) also brings it into line with its .net strategy and an interface that complements MSN explorer with new buttons, icons and tabs. Most ops have complained about the amount of spam that gets into the accounts and these would like to know that a new junk mail filter (more on that later) has been added and a quick address-list function that provides Hotmail members with fast access to their five most frequently used contacts, though it is not useful until it is properly setup, the default just picks the first five contacts in your address book.

The new interface is more colourful and appealing and in theory should allow people to work much quicker with things closer to hand. Logging in no longer takes you into your inbox but into a MSN screen to encourage you to try MSN sites. This I find annoying as I log in to hotmail to check my mail not to visit other MSN sites! I also find the new interface a bit cluttered, so if you don't have a large monitor you be scrolling around more. Also the fonts are a bit small to read easily by default.

The new
spam filter is much touted by Microsoft who says the filter enables
people to choose three different options for stamping out unwanted junk mail. One option is similar to the previous version, while another option has more stringent methods of reducing spam such as routing suspicious email to a bulk folder. The exclusive level will enable people to receive email only from people listed in their address
books. Is this better than the previous spam filter, which didn't really slow down the flow of "spam" to their in-boxes. The new filter now uses a variety of tactics to block junk mail, including keeping track of words commonly used in spam, patterns of words and numbers, as well as looking for mail that is not addressed to the specific Hotmail user. Well does it work? Only time will tell, I have switched on to the medium setting and certainly the flow has virtually stopped though 1 or 2 does occasionally get through. However even on this setting I find that now not all my emails get through even replies to my emails, so in a way the junk mail box has become my new in-box!! As previously there is an option to put contacts and addresses in the Junk Box onto a safe list so that in the future it knows it is not bulk mail. Well the new version is more advanced and again with several more options, but these don't have any effects as they don't work. The emails from the same contacts can still end up in the junk folder even though they're on my safe list!!

It is rumoured Microsoft has a list of spammers which they let through. Don't know if this is true or not. The previous personal spam filter itself is limited in usefulness, with a limit of 250 addresses to filter out, and don't forget that many spammers regularly use rolling email addresses. This tool could be made much more powerful so that the user could define words, such as XXX, free holidays, etc to look for in the email which if matches will then be au
tomatically removed, which the present version doesn't always do. Only time will tell.

In my previous op I said hotmail is pretty fast and simple to use. Well this is still true thats if you use Internet Explorer as using Netscape 4.7 is alot slower than the previous hotmail and sometimes the display is incorrect. No doubt this is Microsoft's way to get the remaining die hards to use Explorer and keep users to their browser after they say Manufacturers no longer have to install the browser with windows (I thought it wasn't separate and that it was integrated with the OS so can't be removed! well now u know it was all a lie) I suppose now Netscape is dead, Microsoft can do what it likes!!


My biggest gripe with hotmail is the account size permitted for the user, offering only 2Mb of user space, where rivals now offer at least 5Mb of space. Still with my other accounts I could always transfer important emails to them, and also means I have to spring clean the account regularly.

A good feature or a gimmick depending on how you see it, is that attachments are automatically scanned for viruses before downloading. However this has caused some problems to download files periodically, with the file often corrupted or refused to be downloaded even if clean. Yes uploads are slllllooooooowww... ALso the attachments don't always get sent either! Again the limit on size of uploads can be frustrating when these days companies like microsoft fail to produce files that are small in size. My word documents regularly span more than 2Mb in size in the new Word format compared to less than a Mb in word 2!!

However security wise, Hotmail is always vulnerable and a target to hackers, well crackers who are looking for holes and bugs. This could be said for other email systems too, just that Microsoft are more targeted and exposed than others. (That'll teach them to release buggy software!)
Also I have e
xperienced on many occasions that I cannot access my account due to server maintence etc.

Still the service offers a wide range of services and signing upto hotmail gives you a passport to use with MSN, such as communities.

This will probably fit in microsoft's future .net strategy that will automatically allocate you a hotmail account and log you on to their additional services!!


I think the service has deteriorated especially when using Netscape but this could be due to the early problems which when fixed might improve. At least as far as spam is concerned. Microsoft are trying to do something about it and as usual not being completely successful. I'm afraid I'll have to knock a star off for the service being too Microsoft orientated, remember the web is supposed to be free and unbiased. Hopefully it will remain free but if you don't like it and don't want to pay, there's always other service you can try until you find one you are happy with.

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