Apr 02, 2001 09:02 PM
8362 Views
Ok…. ok, so hotmail made Sabeer Bhatia a millionaire at a very young age ……made him a hot male in the Silicon Valley; it (hotmail) has been the fastest growing Media Company in the world; it has over 67 million users etc.. etc. But should one really choose this free email service now? Well…
A BRIEF HISTORY
In the recent past (1995) only people who owned a computer and had access to the Internet had email facilities. Then Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith made hotmail that made it possible for people without a computer to have an email. Besides anybody and everybody could check his/her emails from any computer in the world, which had access to the net. Microsoft later bought Hotmail in 1997 for $400 million.
About Hotmail
When you type in your username and password in order to sign in, at the hotmail site, just have a look at the address bar. Instead of “http” written (as in majority of the sites), which stands for “Hyper Text Transfer Protocol”, you will see https written. This “s” stands for “SSL” or “Secure Socket Layer”. SSL is used for sending information encrypted over the net so that no one else can view what you are viewing. Sometimes while signing in hotmail we get a message, which tells us that this information is being encrypted, and being sent. Indeed! A very good feature.
In addition to this hotmail has built in McAfee Virus Scan. So there is an attempt made by Microsoft to block viruses through emails.
There is this facility of “Inbox Protector”, which is meant for stopping junk mail. Hotmail detects junk mail and sends these mails in the bulk mail folder and messages more than 14 days old (in this folder) are deleted automatically.
Other standard facilities include blocking unnecessary senders, a variety of subscriptions, MSN messenger for chatting etc. Mails sent through hotmail are sent almost instantaneous.
So far so good. Then why have I given the title of this review as flop-mail? Well here are the reasons:
As mentioned in the cons, this site opens very slooooo (yawn) ooowly. The page takes ages to load, and the conditions become worse if there are images to be loaded. If that was not enough, of the 10 messages you have received (an example) probably 8 or 9 or all are junk mails or some advertisements. Even these advertisements are of no use to Indian users. If you check the “conditions apply” link to the advertisements more often than not you will find this sentence “ Offer valid only for residents of Canada and U.S.”
I had activated my “Inbox Protector”, in spite of that I continued receiving unsolicited
and junk mails.
Another thing that has happened is that of late I have been unable to check my mails and signin in MSN messenger. I keep getting the message “Either username does not exist or password incorrect”. I have been trying signing in for a long time, rechecked my password again and again but to no use. A friend of mine then told me that hotmail server is down, I waited for about a week or so but wasn’t able to sign in. Finally I decided to make a new email Id (ya… at hotmail again). I don’t know whether the server is still down, but I was successful in making another Id. Even now I don’t know why I am unable to sign in, although my username and password is absolutely correct.
People reading this review must be wondering why I made another Id at hotmail again? Well, I use MSN messenger extensively to chat with my cousins and relatives abroad or in other cities and states. I have nothing to criticize about this service of hotmail, infact because of this I have signed up again with hotmail. However, now I am going to tell everybody to shift over to some other messenger.
So even this feature of hotmail is not going to make me suggest hotmail to any friend of mine. There are many other sites, which offer email facilities like Yahoo, which are, must better and faster than flopmail … I mean hotmail.
