What was the last time you remember mailing to someone's hotmail id? It is very likely that you once had an email id at hotmail. Or at least you would have had lot of friends who were using hotmail once. My first ever email account was in hotmail. But it has been almost two years since I even have an entry of a hotmail id in my address book. The thought suddenly occurred to me as I decided to have a look at my hotmail account after a long long time. I found around 900 mails, all junk! Here are some reasons why I decided to shun hotmail.
Speed: You would fall asleep before it loads up. It competes with Windows 2000 in slow loading(booting). ;-)
Feature set: When others were adding features like pop3, autoforwarding and other features that help you to avoid going to the website to check your mails, hotmail added nothing. And with a 2MB storage limit, if you are a serious user of email, you would spend more time deleting mails than reading them. Besides, hotmail rejects any attachment bigger than 1MB, which means you may miss out a big chunk of emails with attachments.
Complexity of user interface: It is a major exercise to find what you want. The UI looks real cool, but scores a big zero in friendliness.
Reliablity: With Microsoft owning it, this need not be explained in detail. :-) Down time for hotmail is much higher than any other service providers.
Junk mails/spam: For every proper mail that I get, I used to get 15 to 20 junk mails. I am not sure if hotmail was trading e-mailids or any bugs in the site made every thing public. But the problem was(and is) very serious. Again, you spend more time deleting mails than reading them.
Junk mails
Junk mails
Junk mails
There were more options, that geve me better service. :-)
The only reason that hotmail users still seem to retain their subscription is because of msn messenger. It has a very nice interface. It is sleek and easy to use. But this also suffers from high downtime problems.
