11 December 2006

Hotmail accounts upgraded

I have been a loyal Hotmail user for a long long time that I can't even remember when I signed up. It was my first email account and at that time, it wasn't even part of Uncle Bill's empire as yet. Microsoft only announced that it was acquiring Hotmail in early 1998. I was doing my MBA in University of Malaya then. At that time, it was pretty amazing because it was the first web based free e-mail (if I am not mistaken).

We have since moved on and hardly anyone I know, uses Hotmail anymore. I still take great pains to keep the account alive because you never know when a long lost friend might contact you. I had to re-sign up a couple of times because my account had become inactive.
Under Hotmail help, (Your account policies):
Account activity
* Your account becomes inactive if you do not sign in for 30 days, or within the first 10 days after signing up for an account. After an account becomes inactive, all messages, folders, and contacts are deleted, but the account name is still reserved.


* However, for loyal Hotmail users (like yours truly) who have been with them for 2 years or more, in order to maintain our account the log-in grace period is extended to 60 days. (added this later)

Today, I just signed in to see if there were any messages from my old friends. No such luck. Mostly spam and newsletters. However there was one from 'Hotmail Member Services' with the subject heading: Good news! You now have more storage.

I found out that my Hotmail inbox capacity has been upgraded from 250 MB to 1 GB. Not just mine but all Hotmail accounts, "regardless of the market and account age".

It's a welcome move but I can't just help but wonder whether they have missed out on the boat. Most of my friends have since, moved onto Yahoo! and Gmail.

p.s. Seems like they haven't updated everything as yet. If you look at the same help page mentioned above, the Storage limits are still given as:
..... 2 to 250 megabytes (MB) of storage space.

Related Posts:
- Now Yahoo
- Gigantic E-Mail

Related Link: It is Here: Hotmail to go 1GB (1,000 MB) of Storage

Tags:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

i still use hotmail but only occasionally so haven't notice the upgrade. my main email now is gmail (apart from the pop based ones of jaring and streamyx i mean).

i prefer hotmail over yahoo but i see most people using yahoo.

lainieyeoh said...

missed the boat.

i stopped using hotmail when gmail came along because i was still smarting from them deleting all my mail when i was deprived of net access for a while. and, gmail had 1G (which i've already filled up 90% of, sigh).

Dilip Mutum said...

Lucia: I had like 7 e-mail accounts at one time but that has been reduced to 4 now. I have Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and I use all of them for different purposes.

Lainie: YOU HAVE USED UP 90% OF GMAIL SPACE.That's crazy. I have only used up 5%. But then I don't receive a lot of pics and movie clips and I delete a lot of mail.

Anonymous said...

I've been a loyal Hotmail user too, from the time we had 2MB of space. I actually used more of Rocketmail last time, before it was bought over by Yahoo.

Nowadays I love using Gmail because of the tagging feature, but you all must know that there are privacy concerns because Google uses AdSense to scan the content of your mail.

If you join the Windows Live Mail program you actually get 2GB of storage. I'm not sure how you join, I just got the invitation one day when I opened up my Hotmail account.

Dilip Mutum said...

Thanks for the info ac.

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin