Mingle Until Departure

So I log in to Hotmail today, and I notice that rather than "Account Size Critical: You may not be receiving all your messages" and a number in the high 90s for my account usage, there is:


Now, I knew this was coming. Hotmail had sent me a message about two weeks ago (August 2, to be exact) saying:

Dear MSN® Hotmail® Member:
As a valued MSN Hotmail Member, you will receive your storage upgrade automatically in the coming days. Over the month of August we will upgrade the storage capacity of your e-mail account to 250 MB - that's 125 times your current storage limit! We will also increase your attachment size from 1MB to 10MB. This means you will be able to store and attach more than ever and it's free!

That's really nice.

I've had a Hotmail account since well before it was a MSN® Hotmail® account - round about seven (7) years or so, and it's been, up until this morning, 2MB the entire time.

There was a long time when Hotmail was my primary, permanent e-mail - and then a couple of years ago I started bumping up against the ceiling, and rather than delete all my old messages (though I deleted a lot), I just switched. Because other free e-mail had more space, and was...better (e.g., Fastmail).

There was a time when Hotmail was the only game in town as far as free e-mail went (pretty much). Microsoft could've kept it that way, if only they'd've gradually increased storage space, and made their interface better, sleeker, and easier to use.

Instead, they chose to clog their interface, again and again, inserting annoying pages between login and viewing of actual e-mail, and keeping the storage static from 1997.

When Gmail and its splendiforous 1GB of storage came along a couple months back, Yahoo! immediately saw the threat, and within a week and without any hype, upped their mail to 100MB. Which really was nice, and insured that I'd keep using Yahoo! as an auxiliary account (which is all it's ever been). I was a valued customer, and they showed it, and I remain one (though it's not like Yahoo! ever has or will get a cent out of my pockets).

Now, Hotmail does it, and it's "Over the month of August"; yesterday I was in the red and they were threatening to delete my forwarded jokes from high school, now everything's cool.

I suppose I will keep Hotmail as a legacy account - some people for some reason still have that as my e-mail - but nothing else, really; the point of this all is, even when Microsoft does something good, they manage to do it badly.

UPDATE: Fastmail has now also upped the already (or at least previously) superior storage for its pay accounts (of which I have the "Full"); I go from 50MB to 600MB, while the enhanced goes to 2GB. If I ever get some sort of really serious independent consulting gig, this is the option I would take, as it's 2GB, and on a fairly well-protected offshore server. Plus with some really kick-ass other features (e.g., invisibility, ability to shoot lasers from eyes, etc.).