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."
Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Informative)
Quite the opposite.
Fyi., typical spams are less than 100K overall, so majority of the commercial spam filters are not scanning mails for spamming when individual size exceeds 500K. Of course you could change the default, but the performance would be dragged down severely.
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.
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I run my own email server, and I don't see anyone trying to force me to keep certain attachments here. For what it's worth, I've stopped accepti
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(well at least if you grew up in SOVIET RUSSIA)
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Funny)
It makes an ass out of u and ming?
Lots of Mings in china though, be careful with your insults!
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Insightful)
What you will probably see is angry users and complaints; That's the right way to solve this sort of thing. I wish the populate would try complaints or a boycott instead of jumping immediately to calls of corruption and a class action lawsuit.
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Funny)
Like giving people a full refund?
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hotmail has been running for many years with what, millions of users, that's got to be a LOT of ad impressions that users have paid with to use the service. Let's say 10 impressions per session, at an average of 3 sessions per week for 2 million users for 10 years.
That's 10 * 3 * 52 * 2,000,000 * 10 = 31,200,000,000 ad impressions.
Assuming Hotmail has been dredging the users' email to provide targeted impressions, that's got to be at least 0.1 cents per impression, so 31B * $0.001 = $31M.
So $31M as a bare minimum to give people a full refund. That's certainly within MS's reach.
Oh wait, you thought because the users only indirectly pay MS through the fees MS charges advertisers for the user's attention that really the user's weren't paying anything at all? Like MS ever gives away something for nothing.
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Funny)
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So $31M as a bare minimum to give people a full refund. That's certainly within MS's reach.
Considering as how a large portion of Hotmail accounts are obtained with totally bogus sign-up information, I'd be willing to bet most of that money would end up absolutely nowehere. The folks that use Hotmail to engage in dubious dialogue and activities behind a spouse/partner's back, or to register for throwaway one-time visits to sites that require an e-mail address, or just in general to have some small, pathe
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Funny)
Please do not be offended to receive my message in this manner as I ought to have sought your consent and approval before e-mailing this proposal to you. I acted as I did due to the importance and urgency the situation demanded.
I own just over half of the 'Spam' accounts on hotmail and I will soon receive just over half of the $31 million dollar refund. I need some help transferring this money out of Nigeria...
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I'll try, with your, permission, the same business model to see if I can get the New York representatives pay me, because of all the billboards.
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Funny)
What about this "It's bullcrap"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it possible that this guy, who has questionable scientific methods, maybe created his emails (which he doesn't show us their contents so we can't check) in such a way that they looked liked SPAM? Attachments are awfully popular in spam, and if he was creating these random emails with random attachments then they probably looked a fair bit like spam to the Bayesian filters.
If he had created REAL emails with, oh, I dunno, a PURPOSE, then they probably wouldn't have been filtered.
It's just a guess... I have no proof, other than I've never, ever come across this 'phenomenon' of his, and he just doesn't even address Spam filters until late in the comments on his article, and even then he doesn't seem to 'get' how they work.
I might just do some tests and see what happens... I'll report back with what I find.
Re:What about this "It's bullcrap"? (Score:4, Informative)
Then I forwarded that to another isp account... delivered
Then I created an email in hotmail with 2 jpegs and sent it to my first account... delivered
Then I forwarded that back to hotmail... delivered
Re:What about this "It's bullcrap"? (Score:5, Informative)
Its saying that old attatchments are deleted.
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's hardly positive proof. When an email comes out of hotmail, it will go through intermediaries before reaching your test address. Any of these intermediaries (not just Microsoft) could be responsible for leaking your information (and notice, I used the word 'leaking', not 'selling'. Demonstrating a leak is one thing. Proving that Microsoft is purposely selling your information behind your back is another).
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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. An
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Insightful)
They are intentionally providing a low grade without-cost service. The user agreement even says so, and gives you no guarantee of mail delivery.
If you want a reliable mail service, use something else.
If you just want a throwaway account to sign up for some pointless website, well hotmail is reasonable i guess.
Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Exaggeration? Naaah. (Score:5, Insightful)
[snip]
Yahoo also forwards hundreds of spam e-mails to me every day, and SFAIK, there's not much I can do about it.
Sure you can!! You can stop paying Yahoo for shoddy service.
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I wish
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I dont think my mail server needs to be disconnected from the internet before it will let me read the mail that's on it...
Not only mail fraud and conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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mail fraud? maybe wire fraud (Score:2)
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And it never guaranteed to deliver all your mail, or even *any* mail at all. Infact, you have absoloutely no guarantee of service. Didn't you read the signup agreement?
Startling discovery (Score:5, Insightful)
Haha. I've pooped more meaningful articles.
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I would say that about better then 80% of the legit files get through without any issues. But that 80% of legit files is probably less then 50% of all
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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 goi
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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 l
Hard time believing the story (Score:4, Interesting)
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This definitely is the case, no bounces or anything are sent. Today I sent them mail that everybody shoul
Spam filter? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the "over-zealous" spam filter explanation is much more likely...
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?
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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.
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We can certainly infer, based on that, that there is a maximum message size of some value less than 20 meg for free accounts. That could certainly explain some undelivered mail, both inbound and outbound; however, it would be very bad behavior indeed on Hotmail's part if the response to an over-sized mail were to drop it on the floor rather than give it a 5xx bounce.
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, t
Look at it like this. (Score:2)
My guess is that Microsoft will have bought the drives in bulk (it's cheaper and easier) and are very unlikely to be coming even remotely close to being in a position where Hotmail couldn't be alloc
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GMail lose around 50% of emails with zip-files attached. If you are lucky, they will even tell you they have lost it, because they thought it contained viruses. I had 4 PDFs I generated myself, that I just couldn't send through GMail, until I re-packed them using RAR.
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.
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I don't have real Office here, but I've got OpenOffice. Lets see... 2048 bytes of English text...
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 th
Conspiracy and mail fraud? (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be worth noting that the first three paragraphs of the article were ranting about how much Microsoft sucks, so at least we know there was no bias.
How about that. (Score:5, Funny)
It has long been suspected that there is a silent policy that makes network routers automatically drop packets to save on bandwidth. Therefore it really doesn't matter if every client has access to 1 GB/s of Ethernet, since the routers don't deliver the packets to fill up that bandwidth anyway. If that's truly the case, then router manufacturers may be liable for several hundred billion cases of conspiracy and wire fraud.
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If Intent Can Be Proven, Cisco Could Face Millions Of Packets Fraud Charges
Cisco's market capitalization is approximately $133 billion dollars. Let's put that into a bit of perspective. That's enough money to feed and provide medical care for every single AIDS orphan in Africa for 101 years. To put it another way, it's a pile of stacked $100 bills 10 feet wide, 24 feet deep and 16.8 stories high.
You would think that someone in San Jose, California could take time out from counting all tha
I'm skeptical (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing this "test" used emails that looked like spam. It would help to know which ISPs were used and how the messages were sent.
Or maybe there wasn't really a test and this is all just Slashdot spam.
Anyway, I expect that a hundred people are sending each other hotmail attachments right now, so we'll have better data in a few hours...
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And some people noticed [gmane.org] that something is wrong with hotmail.
Email servers should not drop messages. Messages must land in some mailbox or they must bounce back to sender.
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But about bounces, I don't expect them anymore. The huge volumes of SPAM have made me disable bounces for at least one domain that I manage - the NDR bounces were piling up in the queue by the thousand.
Even if I do get bounce backs from messages that I send, I wouldn't normally notice them since all of the NDRs get filtered straight to junk box at my end. Again, this is because of all the joe-job spam runs with spammers using my domains in the fro
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Keyword here is "should". There's plenty of things can go wrong on a mail server which can stop that from happening - and the larger and more complicated the mail system gets, the more likely this is to happen.
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I'm guessing this "test" used emails that looked like spam.
And this is what we call 'false positives' since it obviously was NOT spam. Typically you should have much less than 1 in 1000 of those for legitimate mail if your spam filtering is to be any good. If M$'s spam filtering takes out so many messages it really really sucks big time. So, even from M$ i can not believe this is true. Something else must be happening...
Frankly I cannot believe that so many mails get lost. But then afain, I only use my hotmail account to connect to MSN with Gaim and never EVER use
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I've complained bitterly about this to hotmail support without result.
The problem is that the 81% is misleading.
If the mail is coming from a known sender, then it is likely to get though, which is why people don't see a loss.
However, mail from a random address with an attachment is very likely to get silently dropped (no, it doesn't end up in the junk mail folder). Most users probably ARE losing a lot of mail, but as this mail is probably from people who have not mailed them
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.
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This was only a test of whether Hotmail drops email with attachments, not a comparison of Hotmail with other services. There was therefore no need to include other free services. Moreover, the article explicitly states that the test was done using PAID accounts, not the free service.
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The article does not say this. You're reading into it something it doesn't say.
This is *paid* Hotmail service (Score:5, Informative)
And as far as other ISPs charging you lots of money per month, that's not normally the case for *email* service. My DSL service does cost me about $50/month (but I've got static IP addresses), but my mail-forwarder is $15/year, my ISP where I've got a shell account and run procmail is $7/month, and my wife uses Fastmail as an email provider for $19/year (they've also got free mail and $15-onetime options.)
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!
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That's a valid point, he didn't check his spam folder. However, let's say that Hotmail flagged 80% of the emails in this test as 'spam', despite the emails not being spam - that's not very good either.
Overall TFA did attempt to control for various factors, but the spam issue is indeed an oversight. Another problem is the lack of control for not having attachments - no emails were tested that lacked attachments
Outgoing mail got lost too (Score:2)
It's possible that it ended up in the spam folders on his other ISPs - certainly *I'd* expect email from Hotmail containing a random attachment to be spam
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So long as the bucket's in his mailbox, like a spam folder, that's okay as far as I'm concerned. I'd only be worried if messages were silently discarded by the ISP. Once it's accepted, NOTHING should ever be dropped... I'd be lynched if I tried something like that.
The type (translates to "anything") and size (translates to "anything") of the attachments are mentioned in the vaguest terms, and nothing else is s
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Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)
Junkmail (Score:2)
Profit? (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe it really *is* a feature! (Score:5, Insightful)
oh come on (Score:2)
2) Microsoft is above the law anyway.
I have not observed that problem (Score:2)
cowboyneal should be ashamed... (Score:3, Insightful)
hmmm... (Score:2, Funny)
It balances out (Score:3, Funny)
In the spirit of science... (Score:2)
I haven't seen this behavior (Score:4, Interesting)
-Mike
maybe it has a good explanation (Score:2)
Weak methodology (Score:2)
In addition, why use Hotmail? There are better free s
Scientific Method (Score:5, Insightful)
Not News (Score:2)
Hotmail is an even bigger heap of toss than ordinary e-mail. Providing an e-mail address costs someone money (for the domain registration, and the maintenance of the server -- to say nothing of mains and net).
Similar Behaviour Witnessed (Score:5, Informative)
There are no patterns - size/sender/attachment etc. The mails do NOT appear in the spam folder, and I can watch the SMTP logs in real time as the email is accepted by Hotmail, only to have it never arrive. I simply recommend that people do not use Hotmail and instead use another free email service like GMail.
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Is gmail any better? Yes it is! (Score:2)
It was from an internet cafe in the middle of nowhere East Africa, on a computer running a shady copy of 98 loaded with crap-ware, and it froze up mid way through.
I didn't have the time to reboot and start over, so I just stared at a frozen screen for 10 odd minutes and then tried to get it to send. It worked. Outside of Africa, I've never had a probl
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Try attaching a 1M file to a gmail send... Its quite slow. Often I have to try several times before a successful send. Further, I have never ever been able to send an attachment of size around 10M.
I just sent a message with a 15MB attachment. It was slow - took about 10 minutes to upload, which was about 3 times what I was expecting based on my ADSL connection upload speed, but it worked. Perhaps your connection is to blame for your issues?
They dont have any limit on the attachment size by policy. You can try to send any size... they just timeout.
Yes they do: 20MB [google.com].
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But, of course, you are.
TOS: http://tou.live.com/en-us/default.aspx [live.com]