I have written previously about Microsoft’s Hotmail and what a lame excuse for a mail platform it is – in response to that Microsoft gave an account on their new mail platform, Microsoft Live Mail and I have to say it is a serious disappointment.
One of the biggest problems with Hotmail to date has been the fact that they delete all your mail if you don’t log in for 30 days. This has caused loads of people (myself included) lots of pain as we see several years mail disappear never to be returned.
With Windows Live Mail, that 30 day login has been changed to 120 days in an effort to overcome this problem. However, the proper way to fix this would have been to allow POP access to the mail. Live Mail’s main competitors (Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) both allow this functionality. POP access means you can access the email through an email application such as Outlook or Thunderbird and as these applications poll the servers every 30 minutes or so, it means as long as they are running on your system, you are logging into the servers and will never fall foul of the 30-day limit.
Another reason to allow POP access to email is so that you can read your mail when you are not connected to the ‘Net.
Furthermore, I was made aware of another deficiency of Live Mail this weekend at BarCamp Ireland where one of the speakers bemoaned the fact that you cannot export your contacts in Live Mail! As far as I recall this was possible in Hotmail.
It seems incredible to me that Live Mail would try to lock you into a crummy application by not allowing you to export your contacts. Then again, lock-in is Microsoft’s middle name, isn’t it?
POP is still suppported on older accounts (account.live.com tells you when you signed up, but I don’t know the cut off date), but you have to use a program called Hotmail Popper (find the last free version). I can’t remember the last time I looked at the Live interface.
Tom,
1. It’s a free service, give it a break.
2. Allowing pop access means your by pass their banner adverts. They’re not a charity.
3. Most normal* people will be delighted with the service. (*Non-computer nerds.)
Steve,
Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are free services too and yet they see fit to provide POP access allowing you to bypass their ads. They are not charities either, yet somehow they get by doing this.
Most non-computer nerds will be even more delighted with Gmail and Yahoo! Mail – and not just for the POP – their UI’s are waaaaaaay better than Live Mail’s.
I’ve been using Gmail for specific stuff for ages and I’ve been delighted with it, but imho the new Yahoo Mail has set the bar again. It’s just the berries, I actually enjoy using it. Plus it has a cute factor, see this horrendously overstated post:
http://verbo.se/notablog/space-heaters-make-great-house-warming-gifts/
I use Gmail most of the time, but use Hotmail for “business” use, and have extra email accounts with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and Fastmail for various interests …. it sounds a lot, but I use them all (as well as a few Flickr accounts).
Yes, I agree with you, it is a pain in the arse having to log on every 30 days with certain sites … I’ve put all the info about addresses and passords onto a spreadsheet, to help me remember them all.
Hotmail will allow you to export all your email addresses at one go (a little video on Googlemail showed me how to do it – very useful).
Why the hell can’t they equate Passport_Login to Hotmail_Login, surely that was the point of Passport? I am logged into various MS services most days and yet they have deleted my Hotmail account on multiple occasions.
As for POP – I’d have no issue with them embedding ads in the bottom of each retrieved mail. But what I do not understand is why none of the webmail vendors have embraced IMAP. Seems a much more logical way of keeping all the data in their silos and just giving a view of it in one’s mail tool.
Yahoo is nice but the performance is pretty awful compared to GMAIL. Must be all those useless banner ads that fewer and fewer people are clicking on.
I miss my old Hotmail.
Anybody know how to make Windows Live Mails turn off and back to old Hotmails?
I don’t like it coz I must have IE 6 or Firefox. I’m Operas user.
Please help me… reply to my mail abal_abal@hotmail.com if you don’t mind..
Thankz