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Hotmail finally removes annoying taglines from the footers of your messages
Thankfully, the pleas of Lee and everyone else who found the taglines frustrating have been heard. Microsoft is getting rid of them altogether, moving Hotmail one step closer to being seen as a serious email service. Hotmail's reputation as your parents' webmail provider will take a while to reverse, but this is definitely the place to start.
The messages you get from Microsoft in your Hotmail account will also now stop coming if you don't open them, and the ones you do open will tell MS which future messages might be relevant to you. I'm not familiar with how much spam Hotmail accounts get from Microsoft, but even if it's not very much, less is always better.
I know we love to beat up on Hotmail, but in this case, Microsoft deserves our congratulations. Good move, Hotmail team!
Comments
11
Subscribe to commentssully5059Jun 11th 2010 3:18PM
It's good to see they're making improvements but they really need to improve their support, as I've found out this week.
About 2 weeks ago my account (which I've had since 1997) was somehow hijacked and used to send a spam E-Mail to my contacts. I immediately changed my password and notified their abuse team, thinking I was doing the right thing. Everything seemed fine for a while, then on Monday my account was closed without warning.
There's a link to a form where you can request that they check your account to get it re-opened. Upon submitting details it gives you a ticket number and says you should receive a response within 24 hours. Not only do they not respond within 24 hours (I've been waiting since Monday) but they don't even send a confirmation that your request has been received, which causes people to submit multiple tickets.
On the support forum at http://windowslivehelp.com there are very frustrated people who've been waiting weeks, I even saw two people who have been waiting for 2 months!
The support people copy and paste the same message that there's currently a backlog due to an unusually high number of requests and they're not meeting the 24 hour goal. Why can't they make this clear (on the confirmation page, or by a simple automated E-Mail) so that everyone knows where they stand?
Android underlingJun 11th 2010 3:23PM
I signed up for a lot of MS dev news, so I am not sure exactly how much spam I am getting from them. That said, I know I never signed up for Bing messages and those show up about once or twice every two or three months.
Gardiner WestboundJun 11th 2010 3:25PM
Have had a Hotmail account for 15-years. It worked reasonably well. Back in April it went wonky. Wrote to Hotmail Technical support over a dozen times. Got a reply to about one in three queries. The replies were circular and useless.
Opened a gmail account and signed up for Skype to replace MSN Messenger.
Why would MS chase away a 15-year user?
peterJun 12th 2010 12:48AM
Too little too late, I have converted my family of 23 members to Gmail.
It is YOU who drove your customer away. Remember you used to charge premium for 10MB, 20MB, 50MB mailboxes ? Guess where those customer wind up with ? LOL@YOU
steve8489Jun 13th 2010 7:52PM
Yeah, I'm sure Bill Gates is reading your comment right now and calling an emergency staff meeting to figure out how to get "peter" and his family back.
mccastlainJun 12th 2010 10:01AM
Maybe its because I am getting older, but I switched from GMAIL to Hotmail this year as I got tired of GOOG's labels and being overwhelmed by spam. I also think GOOG's data privacy policy is absurd. I am digging hotmail and looking forward to the up and coming changes that will integrate Office and other services more tightly. Regarding spam from MSFT, I get one or two emails per month but I usually open them as they are sometimes helpful.
Crazy SerbJun 12th 2010 4:51PM
I'd never go back to Hotmail again, no matter how much they say they fixed things... the amount of spam that doesn't get caught by their filters and that I have to manually delete is ridiculous. Even worse, the amount of legitimate emails that get marked as spam completely renders their spam flagging useless.
Oh, and labels in Gmail ARE the next best thing since sliced bread. And that's coming from a non-believer at first (labels? wtf are labels?)
heymynameisbenJun 13th 2010 7:37AM
Too late. Finally switched fully to Gmail the other day and I'm loving it
iecoJun 27th 2010 7:08PM
Hey, for what i see microsoft only remove the tagline if you upgrade your free acount. See their forum:
https ://windowslivehelp.com/thread.aspx?postid=229b9871-6217-4c03-ac4b-c3bc92cf1b7c#229b9871-6217-4c03-ac4b-c3bc92cf1b7c
eztuckJul 1st 2010 4:54PM
ieco, I think the info on that webpage is out of date. It's about a year old.
eztuckJul 1st 2010 4:53PM
My hotmail account is still putting the tagline advertisement at the bottom. Microsoft sucks!