A problem of herding or information cascade maybe
 Mar 29th, 2001
(Apr 9th, 2001)
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  Modena
About me:
21/08/2005 - One of the Original Ciaoers (I was Ciaos Most Wanted in around February 2001 I think, o...
Member since:02.12.2000
Reviews:78
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Review rated by 58 Ciao members on average: very helpful 
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MSN Hotmail www.hotmail.com is probably the most successful web mail provider there is. Naturally this opinion is going to look at the pros and cons of this service, but I shall begin by posing the question of how it got here in the first place, is it the most successful because of misinformed users or by right?
I guess you don’t know what I mean by herding or information cascade, so I’ll tell you a short story. There are two large restaurants in a town, and only 5 out of 100 visitors to the town know which one is better. The first person that arrives is one of the 95, and does not know which one is better so he tosses a coin and there is a 50% chance he will go to the bad restaurant. The second person is uninformed too, and the chances are he will go to the one where the first person went to, i.e. he follows the uninformed leader. The third person is one of the 5 informed people, and goes to the good restaurant. The fourth person is one of the uninformed and sees 2 in the bad restaurant and one at the bad restaurant and goes to the bad one. This is what is known as the information cascade in economics.
“Blah blah blah, he’s just trying to earn 10p by writing useless things hoping no one notices” is what you may be thinking, but I think it would be quite fair for one to come to the conclusion that Hotmail is the market leader now because everybody followed an uninformed leader who just used Hotmail because it was Microsoft’s e-mail system.
The advantages of using Hotmail is that you can
access email from any PC with an internet connection, big deal… there are hundred of web mail services why does everyone use hotmail.
Signing up is relatively easy, you won’t need to tell them your bank balance and your credit rating etc, just the usual, although signing up for Ciao and Yahoo is miles easier!
+It’s free (I’m being sarcastic here, sorry).
+Compose – here you can write emails, there the usual CC and BCC options, if you are sending an email to another hotmail member then all you got to do is type their member name. Rich text format is supported, so you can change fonts and colour etc (this is not unique to hotmail).
+Folders – Sort out your mail in folders, works very intuitively, although Yahoo Mail’s system is miles better because accessing those folders is much easier.
+Attachments – add pictures and little sound clips etc, fairly standard really.
+Address book – just like your Outlook Express’ address book but I doubt you will enter as much info, but it does it’s job.
+Signature – save having to sign emails, it won’t stop the hotmail ads added to the end of each email though.
+POP3 mail – retrieve your ISP email, assuming your ISP does not force you to do it using their connection from Outlook, do you trust Microsoft with your username and password?
+Spam Guard – I think Yahoo Mail had this first, if you turn this on, email that is not directly addressed to you will not be in your mailbox, but if it is from the .hotmail.com or .msn.com domain, then it is allowed to pass the filter, as are BCC emails from address book colleagues. Pretty weak really, especially if a friend of yours is not in your address book and sent you a BCC email. BCC stands for BLIND CARBON COPY by the way, this means that other receivers of that email do not know the BCC recipient received it, only he/she does. Also you can easily specify addresses to be diverted to your mailbox by clicking something like “this is not spam” once you highlight the sender. But the trend has now been for spammers to use .msn.com or .hotmail.com (fake) addresses.
+Block Sender – another mechanism used to tackle spam, but spammers generally use fake email address which change all the time, you are allowed to have 250 entries here, but mine reached that years ago. I have been told that you can set IP masks, like *@spammer.aol.com like in IRC chat channels, pretty useless really.
+Ad free – there are no popups or large banners upon signing up to hotmail.
Does it have anything that differentiates it outright? I haven’t noticed anything as such. However, you do know if your MSN messenger friends are on line and emails to fellow hotmail users are sent directly and if they don’t exist, you will know about it. You can also use stationary, like for Outlook Express, but the appeal of them wear out and it depends on the receiver.
One unique feature worth mentioning is the tiny 2 and a bit megs you get! That is far too greedy, yahoo offers 6 and I think lycos offer 10!!! To be fair, I should mention the free calls to north America via MSN messenger and the videoconferencing service, but that's more from being a MSN member rather than a direct Hotmail thing.
Hotmail also offers extra security when logging on, for example if you are on a public computer, there is the option to not cache any of the pages. I think it is one of the securest web mail products I have experienced actually, sometimes if you use the back button, you have to re-login, with Yahoo, as long as the browser window don’t close and you did not hi “sign out” you are still logged in.
I’ve used lots of web mail products hotmail, yahoo mail, lycos mail (which used to let you store voice messages), ICQ mail (which is good), hotbot mail, another.com (don’t ever use that), go mail, netscape mail, even Stereohpnics mail! And Hotmail is the best (marginally better than Yahoo in my opinion. But nowhere have I received so much spam!!!
Some spam emails say “legally this is not spam because we give you an option to stop the mailings, click here” that is the biggest load of nonsense ever, it clearly is spam, and if you do click it, you just receive more! On average I receive around 20 spam emails a day (on both my accounts), once I got 700 emails on one day from the same sender. I know it is not just me, because I have read some other member opinions here.
Apart from the futile measures of blocking them there is nothing you can do, perhaps email hotmail, but do I have 20 minutes each day to email them about the 20 spam mails I get? NO! Is it a conspiracy? It’s not really for me to say, but how on earth do American companies get my email address and not know my name? Something is wrong somewhere.
I sometimes wonder if spam was present all the time at hotmail, or it is here because of its success. If the spam situation was always there, then hotmail is probably an example of “information cascade”, if not, then Hotmail is the best web mail service and something needs to be done.
Hotmail is my primary account, why? I don’t know, I cannot pinpoint it to anything, once I give my email address to someone, I am stuck with that, it’s a good job it’s easy to use, fast and attractive to the eye. Downtimes are account dependent and about once every few months.
Here are 2 proposals I wish to make:
1) increase the mailbox size to 6-10 megs, (more for loyal users such myself).
2) Have a “report this sender” function. If we do receive spam, we should highlight it and click the “report this sender” button, where someone from hotmail deals with it, traces the sender, reports it to their ISP or the police who arrests him/her! That’ll scare them off…
I think Hotmail will remain the most popular service, it is too popular, too powerful and has too many active members… I heard rumours about a “Ciao mail” that’ll be interesting…
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by (3%):
by (2%):
18.06.2001 14:14
Your conclusion that Hotmail is popular because its popular is true, but not because its owned by Microsoft. It was already the largest free email supplier before Microsoft bought it. The amount of spam on there now means I don't use my accounts. There's plenty of other suppliers, thank goodness.
17.06.2001 23:03
Hiya Modena, good op. Just an aside on the spam issue - I work for an ISP and we often get requests to deal with spammers. Unfotunately due to the time and effort required to track down who the spammers are it is an issue which is very much pushed to the background, a task for the office juniors. An email is sent warning the spammers to cease, but nobody really checks to see if the juniors have tracked the email to its correct source. I'm not saying this is ideal, just saying how it works. In my opinion there needs to be some organisation with full powers to evict spammers set up to deal with this, perhaps set as some sort of cooperation project between the ISPs themselves. A solution has to be found to this rubbish before we all get swamped.
11.05.2001 14:21
Very good review! I too have a hotmail account and spen ALOT of time deleting spam mail which os mostly porn. I'm still very confused as to why this keeps happening to me and not my friends!!!