More "free" email blackmail
There are a lot of perfectly good reasons for keeping an occasional use web-based mail account such as Hotmail. The increasingly despotic behaviour of Microsoft is not one of them.
Get this:
MSN Hotmail account expiration policy
Please be sure to sign in to your MSN® Hotmail account every 30 days. If you don’t, your account will become inactive, and:
• You will lose all e-mails and attachments in your Inbox and other folders
• All of your incoming e-mail will be rejected
• You will lose all contacts in your Address Book
Unfortunately, this information cannot be recovered.* As a valued Hotmail member, we want to make sure you know that subscribing to MSN Extra Storage exempts you from this account expiration policy. It's the smartest way to prevent the loss of all the important information in your MSN Hotmail account.
SECURE MY ACCOUNT
In addition to exemption from the 30-day sign-in policy, MSN Extra Storage also includes:
• 10MB of MSN Hotmail storage — five times the storage of a free Hotmail account
• Larger attachments — send and receive attachments of up to 1.5MB per message
• 30MB of MSN Communities storage — the perfect places for photos, music, and other large files
You get all this for only $29.95 per year, so get MSN Extra Storage now!
Harrumph.
I believe I said just about all I could possibly say about this kind of sleazy, underhanded extortion, when those filth at mail.com declared me legally dead a while back
“As a valued Hotmail member” me arse.
But here’s a question. Just whose email is it anyway? And whose address book?
I don’t think there’s anything of real value that I’d want to keep in my Hotmail inbox, and I’ve never used their address book widget – but that’s not the point.
Like most Hotmail users, I imagine, I’ve only the most superficial knowledge of their terms of use – but surely a smart lawyer could argue a case here that the contents of my personal email inbox, stored under an agreement that I originally accepted because it was free, should be mine to do with as I see fit?
So they want to start charging for bigger inboxes. Fine. Buggers. TANSTAAFL, I know – but they’re still buggers.
But is it even remotely fair to close down an account just because you don’t sign in every 30 days? Typically the times I most need access to a web-only account are few and far between. But when I need it, I really need it.
To force me to sign in every 30 days just to keep the sodder alive (and so that they can continue to force more MSN spam down my unwilling gullet) is just stoopid and annoying.
Oh – and unless you sign in every 30 days, you’d never know that they’re busy sending you “you are now legally dead” notices. Irony not their strong point, I guess.
The built in thesaurus in Microsoft Word lists no synonyms for “blackmail”. True. Go ahead and check.
BTW, there is an alternative, praise be: I’m in the process of switching anything useful that currently hits the Hotmail account over to my brand spanking new michaelo@oddpost.com account. A little early to know for certain, but so far Oddpost certainly appears to rock, IMHO.
OK, it’s $30/year, as opposed to “free” – but if they’ll promise faithfully not to behave like racketeering bumpipe autocrats, I’ll gladly shovel thirty bucks their way every year.
BTW #2 – I should probably point out my own terms of use at this point, to be safe. Read “A note on content”, at the foot of this page.
There are a lot of perfectly good reasons for keeping an occasional use web-based mail account such as Hotmail. The increasingly despotic behaviour of Microsoft is not one of them.
Get this:
MSN Hotmail account expiration policy
Please be sure to sign in to your MSN® Hotmail account every 30 days. If you don’t, your account will become inactive, and:
• You will lose all e-mails and attachments in your Inbox and other folders
• All of your incoming e-mail will be rejected
• You will lose all contacts in your Address Book
Unfortunately, this information cannot be recovered.* As a valued Hotmail member, we want to make sure you know that subscribing to MSN Extra Storage exempts you from this account expiration policy. It's the smartest way to prevent the loss of all the important information in your MSN Hotmail account.
SECURE MY ACCOUNT
In addition to exemption from the 30-day sign-in policy, MSN Extra Storage also includes:
• 10MB of MSN Hotmail storage — five times the storage of a free Hotmail account
• Larger attachments — send and receive attachments of up to 1.5MB per message
• 30MB of MSN Communities storage — the perfect places for photos, music, and other large files
You get all this for only $29.95 per year, so get MSN Extra Storage now!
Harrumph.
I believe I said just about all I could possibly say about this kind of sleazy, underhanded extortion, when those filth at mail.com declared me legally dead a while back
“As a valued Hotmail member” me arse.
But here’s a question. Just whose email is it anyway? And whose address book?
I don’t think there’s anything of real value that I’d want to keep in my Hotmail inbox, and I’ve never used their address book widget – but that’s not the point.
Like most Hotmail users, I imagine, I’ve only the most superficial knowledge of their terms of use – but surely a smart lawyer could argue a case here that the contents of my personal email inbox, stored under an agreement that I originally accepted because it was free, should be mine to do with as I see fit?
So they want to start charging for bigger inboxes. Fine. Buggers. TANSTAAFL, I know – but they’re still buggers.
But is it even remotely fair to close down an account just because you don’t sign in every 30 days? Typically the times I most need access to a web-only account are few and far between. But when I need it, I really need it.
To force me to sign in every 30 days just to keep the sodder alive (and so that they can continue to force more MSN spam down my unwilling gullet) is just stoopid and annoying.
Oh – and unless you sign in every 30 days, you’d never know that they’re busy sending you “you are now legally dead” notices. Irony not their strong point, I guess.
The built in thesaurus in Microsoft Word lists no synonyms for “blackmail”. True. Go ahead and check.
BTW, there is an alternative, praise be: I’m in the process of switching anything useful that currently hits the Hotmail account over to my brand spanking new michaelo@oddpost.com account. A little early to know for certain, but so far Oddpost certainly appears to rock, IMHO.
OK, it’s $30/year, as opposed to “free” – but if they’ll promise faithfully not to behave like racketeering bumpipe autocrats, I’ll gladly shovel thirty bucks their way every year.
BTW #2 – I should probably point out my own terms of use at this point, to be safe. Read “A note on content”, at the foot of this page.
