

The End of Hotmail - Never Looking Back - warkaiser
http://www.alexwilhelm.com/alex_wilhelm/2009/02/the-end-of-hotmail-never-looking-back.html
The world is moving to Gmail, about damn time.
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davecardwell
For the company I work for (hotmail|live|msn) addresses come third, making up
about 1 in 5 users. That’s actually more than I would have expected, and I
suspect is largely due to the audience not being very technically savvy.

GMail just pips Yahoo to the top, both making up about 1 in 3 users each.

Hotmail seems to just magically disappear e-mails at random; they never end up
arriving with our customers. Yahoo frequently “defer” delivery until later
which can be very annoying when sending out verification e-mails. We’ve never
had any problems with GMail delivery at all.

Following the advice on the pages below has helped resolve some of these
issues, but if I were a user of these services I’d rather receive the odd spam
e-mail or it end up in the junk folder instead of having to wonder if e-mails
were occasionally going missing.

<http://postmaster.msn.com/>

[http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/basics/post...](http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/basics/postmaster-15.html)

~~~
warkaiser
I know, I have only had two emails ever sent incorrectly to spam by gmail.

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enra
I love Gmail, but still wonder if this is the hotmail deal all over again.
Hotmail was once great as well. To mimize risks, I use my own domains as
addresses and take frequent backups.

~~~
potatolicious
Privacy and evilness issues aside, there's always the problem that what was
once awesome and free is unlikely to stay so forever. New policies (max
attachment sizes, storage restrictions) etc can also ruin the service.

I pay a very small amount to have my own mail server on my own domain. It is
unlikely to ever change (great for long-term networking) and I control exactly
how crappy or excellent the service is.

Considering how important email is to each of us in our daily lives, even non-
hackers, I'm surprised more people don't pay for it.

~~~
cool-RR
I have my own domain too, in a shared server. But I set mine up to forward to
my G-Mail account. How can one get a good mail interface if not through
G-Mail?

~~~
potatolicious
Well, I'm stuck between two answers:

\- You can't. \- You can, if you use a native client through IMAP. Both
Mail.app in OS X and Thunderbird work very well.

There are some open source projects out there that try to do a good webmail
interface. It's been over a year since I last scoped out that scene, but there
wasn't much stable, mature stuff back then.

------
pj
I prefer not to have google reading my emails.

~~~
jonknee
Microsoft reads your emails too. Any service that has junk mail filters does.
Gmail just does it more effectively.

