Hotmail Fails To Deliver Up To 81% Of All Attachments

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Hotmail Fails To Deliver Up To 81% Of All Attachment Emails


If Intent Can Be Proven, Microsoft Could Face Millions Of Mail Fraud Charges

Microsoft's market capitalization is approximately $300 billion dollars. Let's put that into a bit of perspective. That's enough money to feed and provide medical care for every single AIDS orphan in Africa for 227 years. To put it another way, it's a pile of stacked $100 bills 10 feet wide, 24 feet deep and 38 stories high.

You would think that someone in Redmond, Washington could take time out from counting all that money to actually do something to earn it? Like maybe fix the ridiculously obvious and painful bugs that have been haunting Microsoft users not since the launch of Vista, not since the launch of XP, not since the launch of Win 2000, not since the launch of ME, but since before the launch of Windows 98?

Haha, you say! What bug could possibly have survived Microsoft's insecticide for so long? Since Microsoft took over Hotmail in January 1998, almost a full decade ago, Hotmail users have decried the loss of attachment emails. For the uninitiated, here's how it works.

Whether you are:

- Sending from a Hotmail account to another Hotmail or any other email address

and

- Receiving from another Hotmail account or any other email address to your Hotmail account

...you will lose many of your attachments. The emails simply vanish in transit. No mailer daemon, no bounces, no nothing. Gone like Bill Gates' sex appeal.

Microsoft has forever denied this. Hotmail's delivery statistics are next to perfect and there is no discrimination against attachments, they've said for almost a decade. And for almost a decade they have been making millions of Gigabytes of documents, spreadsheets and photos of grandma's quilts disappear.

On the heels of my controversial Mac Plus Beats AMD Dual Core Test which raised quite a ruckus around the Internet, I figured it was time to drag Hotmail kicking and screaming into the secret laboratory and concoct a perfectly fair test that it was up to Hotmail to succeed at or fail.

I created one hundred emails. Each one had a different attachment. They were all .txt, .rtf, .doc, .jpg, .xls, or .ppt and of random sizes, the smallest being a 6K .txt and the largest a 1.9MB .ppt.

These one hundred emails were split up into five groups of twenty each.

Two different Hotmail accounts were used, let's call them Hotmail-1 and Hotmail-2.

Two different "generic" ISPs email accounts were used in different locations on different servers, again, ISP-1 and ISP-2. To make it perfectly fair, ISP-1 was a Canadian provider in Ontario and ISP-2 an American provider in California.

To allow for different traffic patterns, these times were chosen for the testing, all times Eastern.

9 am Thursday

Noon Friday

3 pm Saturday

6 pm Sunday

9 pm Monday

Five different originating computers were used, one for each day. Each PC was linked to the net via a different ISP, so five different ISPs were used in total to send and receive the files.

Each day, I would log onto Hotmail-1 and send/receive that day's twenty emails to Hotmail-2, ISP-1 and ISP-2. Then I would log onto Hotmail-2 and send/receive that day's twenty emails to Hotmail-1, ISP-1 and ISP-2. Then I would log onto ISP-1 and send/receive that day's twenty emails to ISP-2, Hotmail-1 and Hotmail-2. And finally I would log onto ISP-2 and send/receive that day's twenty emails to ISP-1, Hotmail-1 and Hotmail-2. Only the relevant web interfaces were used, no email clients as Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.

This schedule was determined to make it as fair as possible. There is no way that the delivery or lack thereof was caused by a particular ISP, as we used five completely independent ones from five locations. Neither could it be said that we only sent during peak times as we spread out our sends across five days and at various times of the day. Each email was sent separately, no ccs or bccs. The test was devised to be as unbiased as possible. Either the emails would be delivered or they wouldn't.

Each email was given 48 hours for delivery. If it was not delivered in that time then it was considered Vanished. Interestingly only one email fell into this group, being delivered after 72 hours from Hotmail-2 to ISP-1.

The final results bore out the "conventional wisdom." If emails were donuts, Hotmail would be HomerSimpsonMail. I don't need to reiterate the figures, there they are in blue and red. But for a Hotmail account to destroy up to 81% of all emails with attachments prior to their delivery to a "generic" ISP email account is nothing short of absurd, as these Hotmail accounts were not the free variety, but the fully paid ones. Compare those figures to the ones where the generic ISP email accounts exchanged emails with attachments and you will clearly see the difference. The worst performance was in making 2% Vanish.

It has long been suspected that there is a silent policy that makes Hotmail automatically delete the majority of attachments to save on bandwidth and internal disk space. Therefore it really doesn't matter if every client has access to 2GB of storage since they don't deliver the attachments to fill that space up anyway. If that truly is the case, then Microsoft may be liable for several hundred million cases of conspiracy and mail fraud.

Hotmail is no longer a free only service where you get what you pay for. There is simply no excuse for ripping off users who have paid a significant fee to obtain the reliability and confidence which the Microsoft brand should deliver. Either that, or it may be time to ask the DOJ to step in and investigate what could be a multi-billion dollar scam.

:source: Source: http://hubpages.com/hub/Hotmail_Fail...achment_Emails

I knew it my girlfriend tells me i forgot to attach a file about 50% of the time.Now i can say check this out and shut ya trap! lol

Anyone here remember Windows95????

I remember trying to overclock my motherboard from 66 to 72Mhz, only for Win95 to fail to start. Ironically, DOS worked perfectly, but Win95 would NOT start.

A year or so later, I upgraded to an AMD processor, and one of the newer 75Mhz FSB motherboards and guess what, Win95 still would NOT start, even though the newer Win98 would.

I did a bit of investigation, and discovered an article by some university students who had reverse engineered Win95. Their findings? Win95 was designed to do a speed test, and if it discovered that the FSB speed breached 66Mhz, it would purposely fail. This was to ensure that overclocking was denied.

Question... What gives Microsoft the right to dictate how we use our hardware. They only supply the software. Intel and AMD may have a genuine reason (overclocking may mean poorer sales of higher end chips), but Microsoft had absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Whether a Windows version runs on a low spec or a high end power station makes no difference to the licensing of Windows. You need a unit license regardless of the speed of your machine.

This all goes to show how much contempt Microsoft has for it's consumer base.

I'll go a little deeper now, shall I... Back when the Windows version was 3.1 (and 3.11 for workgroups), IBM had released OS/2 which, with a little help from a few windows DLL files, could run native OS/2 and Windows apps. OS/2 was a fully fledged protected mode operating system. Windows 3.1 was still 16 Bit legacy (real mode 8086).

OS/2 was originally a joint project between Microsoft and IBM, to create the next generation OS, but Microsoft pulled out of the development to concentrate on their very own OS (New Technology OS, or Windows NT).

The main difference between IBMs OS/2 and Microsofts WinNT was that WinNT was roughly three times the price. In other words, Microsoft realised that with their captive consumer base, they could do what they bloody well wanted, and did.

OS/2 is now a specialist OS.

The main contender against Windows is Linux, in many of it's different guises. Microsoft is actively campaigning against open source software.

How does this reflect on HotMail? Simple... Microsoft has such a huge userbase that they can easily afford to ignore the plights of many, since they have a perpetual lines of new consumers who think that Windows is the ultimate.

Microsoft have created an empire based on ignorance, and have ensured that all competition is insignificant. The inclusion of Internet Explorer in their earlier OS packages was done for one simple reason, to knock Netscape off the top spot as a browser provider.

Microsoft now has so much power that their latest OS, Vista, can now decide what hardware we run, rather than it being our own choice. If someone at Redmond decides that a specific graphics card is no longer going to be supported, then every Vista powered computer around the globe will suddenly stop supporting that graphics card (defaulting back to basic VGA mode).

You can now see that Microsoft are arrogant. It doesn't matter to them who complains about what. They will still keep losing attachments. They don't care. As long as the money keeps rolling in, they are a perpetual money making machine. If someone threatens their capacity, they will deal with it. They have become too powerful. Microsoft should have been split into it's components years ago, rather than be allowed to continue as a corporation.

is msn mail is considered hotmail?

Who even uses hotmail anymore :(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Linkin Park

Who even uses hotmail anymore :(

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yeah...Hotmail was the first email system i used when i started using the net when i had Win98..now i use Yahoo Mail

I should also add that hotmail also scans your email, and if it discovers a password, will silently drop the mail. This was tested on a tracker where a password reset was requested. The request email was delivered to the Trash, but the actual password email, showing the newly generated random password, did not arrive.

Beware of using hotmail for torrent sites, or other password driven communities.

this story is laughable at best.

since when does email come under the same set of laws as real mail. you are actullay paying for mail delivery. do you do the same for hotmail..no

free service if it does not work 100% of the time tuff luck.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 4play

this story is laughable at best.

since when does email come under the same set of laws as real mail. you are actullay paying for mail delivery. do you do the same for hotmail..no

free service if it does not work 100% of the time tuff luck.

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You'd be right, if the opening thread referred to the Free hotmail accounts, but...

Quote:

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as these Hotmail accounts were not the free variety, but the fully paid ones.

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If your paying for something, then you expect a quality of service. If Microsoft ARE making attachments vanish, to save on bandwidth, then they are committing fraud, because they are charging for something that they are not supplying (Service).

I stopped using hotmail a long time ago, when google was giving 2GB hotmail still had only 2MB, I mean wtf, and I often didn't recieve my mails etc. just a bullshit e-mail service from a bullshit company

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheFoX

You'd be right, if the opening thread referred to the Free hotmail accounts, but...

Quote:

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as these Hotmail accounts were not the free variety, but the fully paid ones.

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If your paying for something, then you expect a quality of service. If Microsoft ARE making attachments vanish, to save on bandwidth, then they are committing fraud, because they are charging for something that they are not supplying (Service).

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you do realise they still are not bound by the same laws as regular mail though so people screaming mail fraud is plain wrong.

the fella also just claims lots of my attachments dont make it through. he does not state what he is sending still. have you also noticed the increase in spam that is sent as attachments. whats the odds the 19% of things that never made it were labeled up with silly names making hotmail think it was spam.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 4play

free service if it does not work 100% of the time tuff luck.

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He was using their premium service, the one that you pay for. You need glasses.

I only used my hotmail to avoid my actual e-mail from being spam. I use it for internet registration and it's has load of spam junk mail. Since it's a lousy e-mail system, it's still serve a purpose. :)

Thinking of it, what dumb ass still using hotmail for real e-mail delivery system.

why not get a proper response from bill gates aka HOTMAIL before publishing this