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miriam_eA friend, whose computer is not working, asked me to log in to one of his accounts on hotmail to keep it going. It seems that Microsoft drop hotmail accounts that haven't been accessed for a while -- he thought the limit was about 40 days.
I logged in today. I don't like being forced to enable cookies (they are supposed to be a feature, not a requirement), but I enabled them. Then my machine sat there for about 20 minutes on my slow dial-up connection logging in. After a few minutes of this I became curious as to what was happening so I started up my netload tool and watched an exchange going flat out.
A little over 20 minutes on, I closed the browser, cancelling the connection with hotmail. At that point more than 1.5MB of data had been sent from my machine to Microsoft (they own hotmail). Why? Was this normal or had their hopelessly complex system got stuck in a loop, to continue doing this forever? To put the amount of data in perspective, a paperback novel is around 0.3MB to 0.4MB. So was enough data to fill 3 or 4 novels sent from my machine? Or was it the same little chunk over and over again? I will probably never know.
I don't trust Microsoft, given their history of spying on their users (for example, Microsoft's MediaPlayer sends details back to them of whatever movies or audio files you play, and registering Microsoft products you've bought sends them a list of all the software installed on your machine).
I logged in today. I don't like being forced to enable cookies (they are supposed to be a feature, not a requirement), but I enabled them. Then my machine sat there for about 20 minutes on my slow dial-up connection logging in. After a few minutes of this I became curious as to what was happening so I started up my netload tool and watched an exchange going flat out.
A little over 20 minutes on, I closed the browser, cancelling the connection with hotmail. At that point more than 1.5MB of data had been sent from my machine to Microsoft (they own hotmail). Why? Was this normal or had their hopelessly complex system got stuck in a loop, to continue doing this forever? To put the amount of data in perspective, a paperback novel is around 0.3MB to 0.4MB. So was enough data to fill 3 or 4 novels sent from my machine? Or was it the same little chunk over and over again? I will probably never know.
I don't trust Microsoft, given their history of spying on their users (for example, Microsoft's MediaPlayer sends details back to them of whatever movies or audio files you play, and registering Microsoft products you've bought sends them a list of all the software installed on your machine).
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Date: 2008-12-29 01:19 am (UTC)It was 90 days, I think they dropped it to 30 days. That was how I lost my old Hotmail account (and all the e-mail stored therein).
I used Hotmail on dial-up, and never had too many log-in problems, and I certainly would have noticed back in the day if it used 1.5 MB in the days of the 200MB download cap... but I suppose the interface has changed.