Yay! The 572nd review on Hotmail!

Update: I have changed my rating from 3 stars to 1 star. Ever since Hotmail has decided that it wants it's members to pay for more space, handling all the junk mail that is coming in has become overly tedious. My inbox used to take a week to fill up, now it is every second day. Timing seems too convenient to be coincidence and I refuse to pay someone to send me junk mail.


Hotmail – hasn’t everybody at least tried it? Some people love it, others hate it, and some people just barely tolerate it. I fall into the last category. I signed up for a Hotmail account before I even knew how to use the internet. It was about five or six years ago, and a guy in the library at our local college wrote the URL down on a piece of paper, handed it to me and pointed at the computers. Okay! I was finally going to have my very own email address! I signed up, trying numerous user names before I finally got fed up and just picked one – “cranberry”, but 81 people before me had already chosen that, so I picked “cranberry82”. And that’s been the email address I have used ever since.

Sure, Hotmail is as annoying as email can be (well, Zwallet is worse), but everybody I know has that email address. I’ve signed up to numerous web sites using cranberry82@hotmail.com. To change it would be even worse than putting up with Hotmail.

Over the years, I have learned to live with Hotmail. Sure, junk mail seems to be the norm, and I have given my email address to enough sites to have plenty of it screaming through the Hotmail doors, winding its way inevitably to my Inbox folder. Recently (I don’t know why it had taken me so long), I finally figured out how to use the junk mail filter. Before that, I just blocked every email address that sent me an offending email. That just doesn’t work, and after about 250 or so blocked addresses, you can’t block any more, that’s the limit. And it doesn’t work because those annoying spammers hardly ever send spam from the same email address twice. This feature is better used if you have an annoying cousin who keeps sending you jokes, stupid pictures, and never has anything to say of any importance.

Just recently, I signed up a new Hotmail account, one for personal emails, hoping to avoid the junk mail. Boy, was I wrong. Without giving the email address to anybody, I had a flood of junk mail coming in. So I gave up on that account and decided it was just as well for me to continue using my old account.

The junk mail filters are really good, even if it’s annoying that you even have to use them in the first place. You know all that junk mail you’re getting? Read the subject lines – do you see a theme? How many times do the words “teen” and “viagra” show up? Too many? Just add them to your junk mail filter! Go into the junk mail filter, and you can customize what emails you want to receive and what ones you don’t. You can tell Hotmail to send any emails with the word “viagra” in the subject line directly to the Trash Can folder (or any other folder you want it sent to). Do the same for every other word you see in those subject lines that you would never see in an email from a friend (many of these words being words I will not utter here…).

The method described above to filter unwanted message is just the method I use. This is the way the filter is set up:

If: (a)Subject; (b)From Name; (c)From Addr; (d)To or CC Lines
(a)Contains; (b)does not contain; (c)contains word; (d)starts with; (e)ends with; (f)equals (Insert Word Here) Then deliver to (a)Inbox; (b)sent messages; (c)Drafts; (d)Trash Can; (e)Junk Mail; (f) (Any folders you may have created).

So thumbs up for the filter; very easy to customize, and it also allows you to filter which emails you want. So if you always want to receive emails from a certain person, just put that person’s email address in, and tell the filter to always send emails containing that address to your inbox.

Thumbs down for the fact that sometimes emails that should have been filtered slip through (I told you I’m not interested in Viagra!). Maybe these advertisers pay Hotmail to slip them through, maybe it’s just an honest mistake. Maybe I need to add both forms of the word – “viagra” and “Viagra” (capitalized and not capitalized). Hopefully I will figure this out sometime soon!

The main topic of my review was meant to be about the customizable filter, but I think I should also go into a few of the other options that Hotmail provides.

If you click on the “Options” Link, you are taken to a screen that is divided into three sections: Your Information, Mail Handling, and Additional Options. Under each heading, there are 6-7 topics:

Your Information

Personal Profile (the information you gave when you signed up)

Member Directory (choose if you want to be listed in Hotmail’s member directory or not)

Password (where you can change your password)

Secret Question (change the question you are asked if you forget your password)

Language (prefer Spanish over English?)

Free Newsletters (where you can sign up for even more junk mail!)

Special Offers (since when do you request advertisements to be sent to you?)


Mail Handling

Junk Mail Filter (not the customizable filter I speak about above – you can set this at different levels – “Off”, “Low”, “High”, and “Exclusive”)

Junk Mail Deletion (you can choose if messages considered “junk” are deleted now or later)

Safe List (put all your friends here – messages from these addresses will never be mistakenly filtered as junk mail)

Mailing Lists (same as the safe list but applies to messages coming from mailing lists)

Block Sender (block all emails from an email address)

Custom Filters (what I reviewed above – choose what emails you want to receive and what are to be considered as junk)

Alerts (MSN will actually notify your cell phone or pager when you receive new mail)


Additional Options

POP Mail Retrieval Settings (get messages from other email accounts)

Signature (make up a signature which is always added to outgoing messages)

Mail Display Settings (set number of messages per page, line width of messages, and message headers)

Reply-Related Settings (options for when replying to a message – do you want to include the original text in your reply? Do you want each line of the original message to start with a little arrow?, do you want the reply address to be different than your current Hotmail address?)

Sent Message Confirmation (you choose if you want a message confirming that your message has been sent)

Session Expiration (choose if you want your session ended after a set period of time – 2 hours, 8 hours, 16 hours, 24 hours, or never)

To get the best out of your Hotmail experience, you should be familiar with the above options so that you can customize it to work as you want.


The Bottom Line

Sure, I hate Hotmail as much as the next person, but what other options do I have? I have had this email address forever and I don’t want to bother changing it. It could be worse – it could be Zwallet, where if you even get your messages, they can be weeks late (and we thought the postal system was bad!).

Hotmail is easy to use (maybe I’m just used to it), and they occasionally update their site so it doesn’t look the same all the time. These updates don’t really seem to improve anything, but a new look keeps it from getting too boring.

If you’re in need of an email address that you can access from any computer, and you don’t want to pay for the privilege, give Hotmail a try. If you can figure out how to work the filters, you can drastically cut down on the junk mail you receive.

Thanks for reading!



Recommended: Yes