Ever since I opened up an email account in Gmail and Yahoo, I rarely use my Hotmail address. The only time that I DO use it is just to get online using the Windows Live Messenger.
When Hotmail ruled over almost all email services available back in the 90’s, I guess it was okay enough to use. But since the Live version of Hotmail was introduced, it became real cumbersome, at least for me to use. And depending on the size of the inbox allocated for each user, Hotmail’s then 25 MB didn’t even come close to the 1GB and 2GB being offered on Yahoo Mail or Google Mail. The messages seemed to take forever to load and when it did load there was some crappy advertisement that kept swishing across in a panel next to the email viewer. All in all, Windows Live Hotmail made me grit my teeth everytime I had to check my email.
And now, I believe the condition has much worsened since then. Today when I signed in on MSN, I saw that I had 300 something unread messages in my email Inbox. Since mostly junk email (which says a lot about its junk email filters!!) which I almost NEVER read through comes to my Hotmail these days, I decided that I would just mark all of the darned messages ‘Read’ and be done with it. And lo and behold, I could only manage to do that for the first couple of mail items displayed. There was no way of sorting by my unread email & that itself just pissed me off.
This reminded me of a conversation that I had with a colleague of mine at work. We were discussing the difficulties of using Hotmail as an email account, and wondering why people tend to bother with opening accounts in Hotmail. We managed to come up with our own theory that in times to come, Hotmail would diminish its email viewer panel so much and tend to give space for advertisements to rake in the ‘millions’, one day users would find the whole email viewer panel with flash advertisements, with a countdown: “You email will load in 60 seconds. Please be patient with us!”. God, commercialism and its effects on poor us!