Hotmail Delivers Far Fewer Emails with Attachments 315
biednyFacet writes "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."
Hard time believing the story (Score:4, Interesting)
This is cool (Score:5, Interesting)
The left hand invents a bloated file format that makes a 2000-byte document take up a megabyte (or whatever the exact anti-compression ratio is). (For current purposes, we'll say Microsoft Office. Not the only offender, but the most amusing in this context).
Now, the right hand figures out that they don't feel like sending all those bloated bits over the wire. Users will eventually figure out they should be sending plain text, perhaps.
Just sit back and watch the show. If we had *tried* to promote open standards in email, we couldn't have done this well.
Re:Startling discovery (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing this "test" used emails that looked like spam. It would help to know which ISPs were used and how the messages were sent.
Or maybe there wasn't really a test and this is all just Slashdot spam.
Anyway, I expect that a hundred people are sending each other hotmail attachments right now, so we'll have better data in a few hours...
apples and oranges (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, the article takes a lot of pains to say how perfect the experiment is. A perfect experiment would have included at least a handful of other free email services.
Bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and he never does mention if he checked his fucking spam folder. I wonder what's in there.
Seriously, this is just too fucking much. Made worse of course by the fact that Slashdot is now partaking on the page impression revenue. Next comes Digg and every other "news" website. Spreading FUD on teh interwebs sure is profitable!
Re:Spam filter? (Score:5, Interesting)
The spam filter idea is indeed the most likely cause, though. I've been in the email security business for four years and was a postmaster at an ISP before that, and this phenomenon has "spam filter" written all over it.
Well, OK, second most likely. I read TFA and what it really has written all over it is "bullshit." Description of the test mails is pretty sketchy, doesn't mention if the attachments were fake, real, or some mix of the two, if they contained spam or viruses or not, etc. (if they did, it would certainly produce numbers like TFA puts up), no samples of the mails used, etc. In short, it bears little resemblance to what one might call a "real" study. I'm sure I'm not the only mail admin who read it and called BS.
The whole thing reads like nothing but a smear job on MS, and a million miles from unbiased. I dislike MS as much as anyone, but TFA is just whack. I mean, there's so many bad things about so many MS products that we *know* are true, why does somebody need to make up stuff like this?
Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm skeptical (Score:3, Interesting)
But about bounces, I don't expect them anymore. The huge volumes of SPAM have made me disable bounces for at least one domain that I manage - the NDR bounces were piling up in the queue by the thousand.
Even if I do get bounce backs from messages that I send, I wouldn't normally notice them since all of the NDRs get filtered straight to junk box at my end. Again, this is because of all the joe-job spam runs with spammers using my domains in the from line.
The real moral of the story is that spammers suck and they have ruined any concept of reliable email delivery. And the hotmail guys face the same issues as me, except 1 million times worse - literally.
Re:Bullshit (Score:1, Interesting)
In other words: "It never happened, except when it did happen."
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Interesting)
If Microsoft, like many other online service providers, advertises or solicits business via the mail (certainly, they've done that for MSN, though I don't know if they have for Hotmail per se), it is governed by the same law that governs anyone else making such solicitations (not the USPS, but other postal service users).
OTOH, any online fraudulent solicitations by Microsoft would be more likely to be wire fraud, but Microsoft may be insulated from such charges from "free" users since Microsoft, while it uses them to get money from advertisers who hope to target them, does not get money or property from the users directly.
On the third hand, depending on how they market to advertisers, they may be guilty of fraud (regular, wire, mail, or all three) if they've misrepresented to them the kind of service their advertising will be associated with, since that is quite arguably a material misrepresentation directly to induce the advertiser to give money or property to Microsoft.
Especially since he was actually spamming himself. (Score:3, Interesting)
And, er, good luck on trying to convince millions of Joe 'n' Jane Sixpacks (who are not, typically, sending 1.9 Mb PowerPoint slides to each other) that a hyperaggressive spam filter is a bad thing.
(I leave entirely aside the digg.com(TM) style teenage hysteria about mail fraud and conspiracy. Geez, the same guy who wants the gummint to intrusively monitor and regulate a private company's e-mail business probably shrieks like a little girl at the notion that the NSA might wiretap recent immigrants of Saudi extraction who make an unusual number of satellite phone calls to the lawless uplands of Pakistan. Talk about mental inconsistency -- it's a wonder some people's brains don't segfault twice a day.)
Re:Spam filter? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://get.live.com/1586062162?workarea=1 [live.com]
The Windows Live Hotmail Plus yearly subscription of £14.99 (inc VAT) includes 4 Gigabytes of total Windows Live Hotmail account space, the ability to send larger attachments up to 20 MB, no graphical ads, and exemption from the account expiration policy. Refund only available if cancelled within one month from purchase and automatically renews yearly unless cancelled. You will receive a renewal letter 30 days prior to the renewal date.
However the regular free service doesn't even mention restricted attachments
http://get.live.com/mail/features [live.com]
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't seen this behavior (Score:4, Interesting)
-Mike
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Interesting)
They used to be images (gif, jpeg) but spam filters started getting wise and running OCR software, now PDF files are all the rage because most of the OCR programs can't handle PDF yet.
Those of us using text based mailers don't even see the actual spam.
Re:Startling discovery (Score:3, Interesting)
I got this hit, which is remotely interesting
Regardless, the fact that there isn't a big uproar is usually a pretty good indication that there isn't anything insidious going on here. Either the guy who made the article is full of shit, or, more likely, he just has some part of his test that was glitchy. Although, in his comments he said that he made sure that a bunch of common reasons were all properly accounted for... I wonder if he got his spam properly.
Re:Hard time believing the story (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is cool (Score:3, Interesting)
DOC(6, 95): 64k
DOC(97): 68k
Office 2003 XML: 16k
ODT: 20k
Of course, the ODT is compressed with ZIP and the DOC isn't.
ODT uncompressed: 120k.
DOC(95) compressed: 5k.
And that's ignoring the fact that the *Office suits and their formats are designed for complex layout, so they have that overhead wheather you use it or not. If you want a 2k text file with no formatting: save it as a fucking text file.Exactly. This has nothing to do with evil formats, just idiot users choosing the wrong tool for the wrong job.
Re:Startling discovery (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I can also believe those who state that they have never lost mail.
Why? Because they are being eaten by hotmail's spam filters, which, despite no mention of this in the hotmail documentation DO siliently delete mail. No, they don't end up in the junk mail folder.
Thus, if you get attachments from accounts that don't get caught by the spam filter, then you won't see a loss.
However, if someone random sends you an attachment, then hotmail is very likely to lose it.
Old days (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead of deleting the NEW emails or bouncing them, Hotmail deleted my old / saved emails. (Even those in separately saved folders.)
Yeah. I lost a lot of important emails during that time and I was never able to get them back. I was quite upset. (I still am when I think about it... grrr..)
Other than that, I've never really had a problem with my Hotmail account.
When they offered more space for a yearly fee, though, I did pay for that, so maybe it's only free accounts which have the problems?
Kris
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:3, Interesting)
Tell me, why Microsoft and not AT&T? Besides, wouldn't a company harvesting emails through their server forge their headers to pretend they belong to QWest or AT&T? And please don't get me started on QWest, QWest does not even have the redundant internet backbone it claims to have, so when QWest goes down, and it does go down -- you can be sure your packets get re-routed everywhere. And it's not like I'm playing devil's advocate here. Take a look at what AT&T did just one month after an employee testified in front of Congress that AT&T was sharing its data center with the NSA. Take a look at the vague new wording of their privacy policy.
"On June 21, 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that AT&T had rewritten rules on their privacy policy. The policy, to take effect June 23, 2006, says that "AT&T -- not customers -- owns customers' confidential info and can use it 'to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.'"
What the hell is that supposed to mean? "protecting its legitimate business interests"?
Does this mean that:
a) They're cooperating with the NSA.
b) That they're selling your information to Affiliates?
or c) All of the above.