Story about hotmail

I ran into an interesting situation with hotmail a few months back and I figured I'd relate it and see what opinions people had about it.

I have a friend who is in a band, and he was using a hotmail account to send out dates of his upcoming shows. This guy doesn't have a computer, so he basically went to the local library, used a PC there to get to hotmail to email fans who SIGNED up at one of his shows.

Well it turns out, after using hotmail for 2+ years, and gathering 100s of people, hotmail decided to terminate his account. He could no longer log on, and thus asked me if I could find out what happened.

After a few e-mails using hotmail's comments "form", I recieved a response from hotmail informing me that my friend had been deleted because he sent unwanted "spam" messages. One person on his mailing list complained about recieving emails from him, stating that they never signed up to any list, so they cancelled his account. I argued with them about this, and they got rude with me, stating that this "person" who complained was a "reliable" source. The matter was looked into again, and would not be reversed.

I tried to argue to at least get his contact list, but they wouldn't even do that. He was disappointed with hotmail and wanted to look into sueing them, but I told him that would never work and that he didn't have enough grounds to sue, etc. etc. so he just let the thing go.

I advised him to try and get a yahoo email account because I've had no problems with mine and my old band used yahoo for 4+ years now with no problems. If anyone knows of a better free web-based email out there, please let me know.

Anyways, just an interesting story about Hotmail.

Noone is surprised by the actions hotmail takes against some users, and there really isn't much you or your friend can do to stop them. Don't like show, change the channel is thier usuall response. And as a matter of fact, their TOU states

Microsoft reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to terminate your access to any or all MSN Sites/Services and the related services or any portion thereof at any time, without notice.

So... sorry to hear about your bad experience with them, but hey thats life in the big city and unfortunately you cant do anything to them.

Speaking of free mail, you could check out www.hotpop.com - they do not have web interface though, just pop/smpt through mail client.

I thought Yahoo was stopping free email, and Hotmail was going into a pay-for-the-full-service situation.

http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/news/578957.html

Look somewhere else is probably the best thing to do.

email.com seem to be remarkably good - no bollocks, just a good, crisp webmail service.

christo