Undoubtedly the worst thing about Hotmail is the spam. They have introduced Bulk Mail folders where you can attempt to catch most of it, but you never can. It is very frustrating trying to pick out your real email from in between penis enlargement, XXX pictures and people offering to make me a doctor for free. The inbox gets about 10% of the spam coming in but I still have to scan the Bulk folder several times to make sure my real email is not in there. I personally get about 150 – 200 unwanted emails a week.

You only get 2mb of space for all of your emails (including the afore mentioned spicy ham). Once you reach the maximum size it decides what to delete on a oldest gets deleted first basis – not what is bulk mail basis (I think this is still the case, I maintain my folders every week to make sure I stay below 2mb). The accessing of the mailbox is slow from work; it might be the company firewall/internet connection though. Access from home (cable) is adequate.

On the brighter side, it is free and you can be anonymous if you want to be. If you change your ISP and do not want to commit to your email (@aol.com, @msn.com, @earthlink.net etc.) for your permanent email address then you need something like this. I have recently moved to mailbank.com as my primary email address. They let you use your surname (if they own that domain) in your email address and you can automatically forward it to wherever your current ISP is, this costs about $10 per year. I have my P@Crabtree.com email address feeding emails to my Hotmail account. Once everyone uses my new id instead of my Hotmail id then I will close it down.

My wife uses a Yahoo mailbox and she gets less than 5% of the spam I do. I would switch to Yahoo but everyone I know has my Hotmail ID. My son has a Hotmail account and I do not like the content of some of the email he gets.

Although I am keeping my account, I would choose another provider if I started from scratch.


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