E-mail at hotmail.com
"Tyler Nally" (tnally@iquest.net)
Tue, 17 Aug 1999 12:15:54 -0500
Greetings saints in the name of Jesus!
Normally, I'm not a big fan of web based e-mail accounts...
like excite.com, bigfoot.com, iname.com, mail.com, hotmail.com,
yahoo.com, usa.net, etc., etc., etc.....
Why? Mostly because they generally don't allow the free e-mail
accounts a fairly sizeable amount of disk space to receive e-mail,
store it, etc. They typically range from 2 megabytes of information
to about 5 megabytes of information. The smaller the worse, the
larger the better.
We've had times on Higher-fire when people have had their accounts
deleted from the www based e-mail provider simply because they couldn't
keep up with the volume of e-mail that is sent out by the more verbose
of lists. I remember one saint on the list a couple of years ago,
had her e-mail account deleted 3 times by the hotmail.com folks because
they couldn't keep up with the processing of incomming higher-fire
e-mail (let alone anything else she might have been subscribed to at
the same time).
So.... generally, I'm not much of a fan of www based e-mail accounts.
Of them, I've generally been least favorable with the folks at hotmail.com
(which is now a subsidiary of MicroSoft Network) because of all of the
www based e-mail accounts, hotmail.com seemed to be the worst of the
bunch according to our experiences of H-F e-mail getting to hotmail.com
subscribers. Seems like when I've used hotmail.com in the past, I could
send e-mail from one e-mail POP account and it'd take hours of time before
it'd arrive at hotmail. To me this wasn't very acceptable. The only other
thing about www based e-mail is the small disk quotas. With such small
disk quotas, it forces the person to check their e-mail accounts at the
www based provider more frequently to avoid from the threat of disk quota
breech. Once disk quota has been breeched, e-mail can't go in- or out-.
But, I gotta tell ya, my opinion of them has changed recently with the
addition of a new computer in the house with Windoze98 (2nd edition) on
it with Outlook Express 5.
I was a fan with Outlook Express 4 as it was a pretty good e-mail client
that I could use on my laptop that I could easily keep track of several
POP e-mail accounts concurrently. One at eli.elilabs.com, one at iquest.net,
one at mcp.com, etc., etc., etc. It was just a good tool for e-mail to
allow me to do everything I wanted in one place.... in Outlook Express 4.
Outlook Express 5 took the good things of Outlook Express 4 plus they've
integrated hotmail.com e-mail access directly into the e-mail client. So,
you aren't limited to reading e-mail and sending e-mail directly from the
webpage at hotmail.com and waiting for the pages to refresh, etc. It'll
download directly to the PC in the Outlook Express folder directly for
the account. Once it's on your local PC, you can do with it as you
like other e-mail clients. You can reply, you can forward, you can attach
files, etc. Just like a regular POP account. The only thing about the
accounts at hotmail.com is the fact that they only give you 2 megabytes
of storage for all *FOLDERS* of e-mail out at hotmail. Something you also
might not realize, is that all of the folders at hotmail.com are replicated
on your PC. Only the volume of the contents of the "Deleted Items" folder
doesn't count towards your 2 megabyte quota. So, that means, if you've been
on hotmail.com for some time and your *Sent Items* folder has a bazillion
messages in it, that volume of the messages in it are counting towards what
you can and can not do through hotmail.
My suggestion, make a separate local folder in Outlook Express 5 that you can
*move* your incomming e-mail from your hotmail.com account to ... and also
make another folder that you can keep your *sent* e-mail in as well. The
more messages you can keep out of hotmail.com's storage, the better it will
be as the hotmail.com mechanisms are always checking current message volume
(not including "Deleted Items") to allow incomming e-mail in or extra large
e-mail out.
I'll give an example. Recently, I made an e-mail account for my wife (Sis
Treva ... "Tree - Va" ... rhymes with "viva") at hotmail.com with the address
of tlnally@hotmail.com. She subscribes to another active list of just
apostolic ladies and gets quite a bit of e-mail and she sends quite a bit of
e-mail. On this other list, there's a fair amount of e-mail file attachments
as the ladies send pictures of their kids, grandkids, boyfriends, youth groups,
etc., etc., etc. Well, she tried to send a *huge* Windows Bitmap picture file
to me at my iquest.net account from hotmail.com and it wouldn't allow her to
do so. Why? The windows bitmap file was too large for the outgoing message
to be replicated and stored within the 2 megabyte limit at hotmail.com. It
just wouldn't fit.... because there were a bazillion messages taking up lots
of space at hotmail.com in the "Sent items" folder as well as a half a bazillion
items in the "Inbox". Between the two, there was too much disk space being
consumed to allow the transfer of this windows bitmap file through hotmail.com
e-mail. Once I created Outlook Express folders locally that I could drag-n-drop
the e-mail in the "Inbox" and the "Sent items" folder, I moved all of the
messages to the local folders which automagically sent the copies of those
message at hotmail.com to the trash. Which is what is needed to keep as many
messages as possible out of the areas at hotmail.com that won't be counted
against the 2 megabyte quota. I think by the time I was done moving her e-mail
around, she was down to 10-12K of messages at hotmail.com which would allow
her to do anything she wanted.
So..... I think hotmail.com has come lightyears in performance in the recent
years. Still not quite as good as a regular POP e-mail account as there may
be times when you just can't do what you want to mail-wise because of the
disk quotas that are imposed when you're not properly managing your e-mail
at hotmail.com. I think hotmail.com is generally good. The one thing it
forces you to do is be more regular with e-mail checking and e-mail message
maintenance than people would normally like to do. But, if you're a stickler
and you want as much out of it as humanly possible, and you can remember to
move the copies of incomming e-mail and outgoing e-mail to local folders in
order to keep hotmail.com as empty as possible, then you can get quite a
bit of use out of it ... with some work.
Bro Tyler
--
Bro Tyler Nally
Owner Higher-Fire Oneness Apostolic E-mailing list
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