Okay, let's clear up some facts here about the free services. I do have inboxes with all 3 (Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo) so I'm not biases towards any particular one. I just keep reading the same rants, complaints, etc every so often I figured I'd reply now.
Inbox space is becoming like Horsepower in cars. Who really needs a 400hp 4-door sedan? There is a race to supply the biggest inboxes even though most people don't need that much space. Com'on, 1GB? Even 250MB is huge. Most normal users don't need 1GB of storage, and no, we aren't "normal" users
Fact: Hotmail's spam guard has been evolving and is much better than it was before. People that say it "sucks" and always has sucked are fooling themselves. The spam detection has gotten much, much better in last 6-12 months, there has been decrease of spam by about 25%-50% in my inbox.
Fact: Microsoft is a target for spammers since there are so many users compared to the other services. I think I read that Hotmail has over 200 milliion users. People, this means that spammers will target Hotmail over other email providers. Why? They can brute force email addresses via scripts and get the biggest bang for their buck. Why try to spam another email provider (eg. Yahoo) that has a fraction of the users? This is why you guys are getting so much spam.. Look at this example: Suppose that 10% of users get 1 spam message. 10% of Hotmail's 200+ million users is far greater than 10% of Yahoo's users (I think it's <50 million). Percentage wise, I'm betting that Hotmail is on par with other providers.
No one has mentioned Gmail's privacy antics with the fact that ads are targetted based on yoru email content and that they archive all your mail even mails that you have explicitly deleted. i remember people jumping all over Yahoo awhile back about some privacy violations, but those were insignificant compared to what Google is trying to pull.
Last thing is that after using gmail for about 2 months, their UI is horrible. Sure there are no huge banner ads on gmail (i love this), their UI is actually really cluttered and at times unusable. I feel like I"m part of this huge usability study where they are trying to work out their kinks. Definitely not ready for prime time at all. Yahoo and Hotmail whoop google's butt here.
Food for thought.
Inbox space is becoming like Horsepower in cars. Who really needs a 400hp 4-door sedan? There is a race to supply the biggest inboxes even though most people don't need that much space. Com'on, 1GB? Even 250MB is huge. Most normal users don't need 1GB of storage, and no, we aren't "normal" users
Fact: Hotmail's spam guard has been evolving and is much better than it was before. People that say it "sucks" and always has sucked are fooling themselves. The spam detection has gotten much, much better in last 6-12 months, there has been decrease of spam by about 25%-50% in my inbox.
Fact: Microsoft is a target for spammers since there are so many users compared to the other services. I think I read that Hotmail has over 200 milliion users. People, this means that spammers will target Hotmail over other email providers. Why? They can brute force email addresses via scripts and get the biggest bang for their buck. Why try to spam another email provider (eg. Yahoo) that has a fraction of the users? This is why you guys are getting so much spam.. Look at this example: Suppose that 10% of users get 1 spam message. 10% of Hotmail's 200+ million users is far greater than 10% of Yahoo's users (I think it's <50 million). Percentage wise, I'm betting that Hotmail is on par with other providers.
No one has mentioned Gmail's privacy antics with the fact that ads are targetted based on yoru email content and that they archive all your mail even mails that you have explicitly deleted. i remember people jumping all over Yahoo awhile back about some privacy violations, but those were insignificant compared to what Google is trying to pull.
Last thing is that after using gmail for about 2 months, their UI is horrible. Sure there are no huge banner ads on gmail (i love this), their UI is actually really cluttered and at times unusable. I feel like I"m part of this huge usability study where they are trying to work out their kinks. Definitely not ready for prime time at all. Yahoo and Hotmail whoop google's butt here.
Food for thought.