Not perfect but likeable. Review on Hotmail

If internet transformed the mode of information to the world in the 21st century, then e-mail, its most used baby has transformed the way people communicate with each other. Now there are almost a million sites that offer you to register with them and get your personal e-mail. But what I have here is one of the most reliable and feature-rich websites which is an altogether delight to register.

Probably the father of all e-mail sites is Hotmail. Besides Yahoo!, this one has even better user base, is the most reliable around, all thanks to its direct association with Microsoft. It does have a smart name and let's see how it fares:

Time for loading: 3.0/5

Speed of login is average in Hotmail with two pages and two security message boxes to bear before the real inbox can be displayed. The message boxes can be switched off, but if it’s the first time on a system that you are checking your email, then you gotta bear all of them. Sometimes its definitely a pain if your connection is slow.

Presentation of Inbox: 4.5/5

Its been three years that I have been using Hotmail, and one of the sole reasons why I like it is because its all blue, and blue’s my favourite colour. Moreover there’s this neatness and consistency in design which prevails all through the site. Sections like Inbox, Compose, Home and Options look as if they are bookmarks of the respective pages. In all, the presentation and look of Hotmail is elegant, innovative and simply the best.

Composing and Composing features: 4.5/5

Writing good-looking emails is another area where hotmail scores wonderfully. You get a rich text editor complete with paragraph indenting, bullets, text colouring and background colouring (although no. of fonts could be increased) , a dictionary, thesaurus, superb spell-checking and sending signatures in both HTML/text. Adding attachments is a breeze and its one of the least frustrating as no new window pops up for adding them. Maximum Size of attachments can't exceed 1 MB, but no. of attachments can be unlimited. Overall, composing and sending messages from hotmail is extremely easy and you get a host of features as well!!!

Extra features: 4.5/5

Extra features include a calendar, direct configuration with MS Outlook and Outlook Express (Very helpful), filters for blocking known domain names (The list is limited to 250—so make sure that you don’t block too many domains), adding known addresses, sending automated replies and checking 4 other POP3 accounts. There is a selection of languages as well, in which Hotmail can be used—Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish and Chinese (It’s a pity that I don’t know any of these, so haven’t used any, but yes, the other day in the cyber café I saw a Chinese couple checking their Hotmail in Chinese—proof enough that it works well!!!) You can also customize the number of messages displayed at once, line width and message headers by going into the options, but sadly enough you can’t change the colours of your inbox. One feature I like is session expiration—You can set the number of hours after which your session will automatically expire---a boon for me, as I am very forgetful in signing out. Overall, the list of features provided by Hotmail is impressive !

Storage Limit: 2.0/5

One reason where Hotmail clearly is awful is the amount of space it gives—JUST 2MB (You expect atleast 5 MB), which is clearly too less considering the amount of emails that are being received everyday. Because of such a meager storage limit, I have to check my account daily, and if I skip 2 days even, I get goosebumps. Can’t even count the number of times my account has exceeded the 2MB limit and has been disabled consequently…But I have learnt to cope this by deleting stored messages, particularly those with attachments, which are generally larger and by saving stored messages on my computer. I hope Hotmail is listening!!!

Ease of use and Help:4.5/5

Another section where Hotmail scores is the ease of navigation and registration. All thanks to the consistency in the site design, you never feel lost in the site, and the registration process is one of the simplest of all the sites. However getting a short username, and that too of your choice will be tough, owing to the large user-base which Hotmail boasts of...so don’t be surprised if you end up with a funny ID. Help is another area where Hotmail excels. Its just a click away and there are extensive topics from basics like How to write an email to getting extra storage to FAQs.

Spam Protection:2.0/5

Hotmail is clearly a Spammer’s Paradise. Within a day of creating my new Hotmail account the spam starts flowing in, almost as if spammers have sunk a tap directly into Hotmail's user database and are slurping up a free-flowing torrent of e-mail addresses. I have heard that its called dictionary-attack. A dictionary attack utilizes software that opens a connection to the target mail server and then rapidly submits millions of random e-mail addresses. Many of these addresses have slight variations, such as ''jdoe1abc@hotmail.com'' and ''jdoe2def@hotmail.com.'' The software then records which addresses are ''live'' and adds the addresses to the spammers list. These lists are typically resold to many other spammers. Dictionary attacks are not new, and many e-mail servers are protected against them, but Hotmail and MSN servers are not. Microsoft needs to implement anti-dictionary attack -- also called anti-brute-force attack -- protection on their mail servers Until Hotmail/MSN finds a way to permanently prevent the attacks, the only way to protect against harvesting attacks is to create a long user name with plenty of random characters interspersed with digits -- one that even dictionary-attack software trying billions of random combinations probably cannot guess. That said, the Junk Mail filter is getting better day by day, and can be set-up by going into the Options...My advice is to check your Junk Mail folder everytime you check your Inbox to see if some important email has been trashed as spam.

Total Points: 25/35 (71.5%)

Overall:

Its been 3 years I have my account on Hotmail, and by my experience I would say that Hotmail still makes a lot of sense for opening an email account. Its plus points are ease of use, extensive features, reliability and a sleek design, although I am still not satisfied with its spam protection and storage limit...but its improving and is expected a revamp very soon...

Reason enough for me to recommend it to all of you...

Comments are wanted like always....