bruceb news

The days of free e-mail are drawing to a close. Yahoo, Lycos, and Hotmail have all started to change their free e-mail accounts to make it more likely that users will pony up a monthly subscription fee. Today, Hotmail announced it will start charging to retrieve mail from other POP mailboxes – just as Yahoo and Lycos announced earlier this year. More importantly, Hotmail reduced the amount of storage space offered for free, and tweaked its junk mail filter a few months ago so that most junk messages are no longer caught and filtered into the trash can. Since Hotmail accounts are inundated with spam, the result is that your Inbox quickly fills up to the (reduced) space limit and Hotmail shuts off your account until you manually clean out your Inbox. […] continued

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that America Online has continued to use Microsoft Internet Explorer as its browser engine, even though it acquired Netscape last year – pretty ironic, eh?

Well, an even better commentary on Netscape’s software skills comes today from the offices of Time Warner. After the merger with AOL, Time Warner issued an edict to all of its divisions requiring them to use AOL’s email services – software developed by Netscape, running on AOL’s public servers.

It has been a disaster. “Management got months of complaints from both senior and junior executives in the divisions involved, who said the e-mail system, initially designed for consumers, wasn’t appropriate for business use. […] continued

Microsoft is going to start enforcing its policy of deleting Hotmail accounts if they’re not used at least once every thirty days. If you have a Hotmail account for convenience, check on it every once in a while.

The responsibility of owning a computer today includes owning an antivirus program and keeping it up to date. If you haven’t affirmatively done something to update your virus definitions in the last two weeks, then you’re at risk, and you’re putting everyone in your address book at risk. It’s not difficult – the antivirus programs make it very easy to remember to stay up to date. It’s not glamorous or fun, either, but it’s an unavoidable part of owning a computer in 2001. You just have to do it. Update your antivirus program every two weeks – no excuses.

But let me stress something else that deserves repeating. […] continued

MSN subscribers are being forced to use web-based e-mail, instead of the standard POP3 e-mail that was previously available. It’s similar to Hotmail, although the default installation of the MSN software on your own computer gives you a highly customized screen for viewing your mail. If you’re an MSN subscriber, the advantage is that your mail can also be viewed from any Internet browser anywhere – you’re not limited to viewing your e-mail on your own computer. But MSN has done a terrible job of implementing the service and helping existing customers deal with the migration. The change hasn’t been adequately described and subscribers weren’t warned about the consequences. […] continued

The World Trade Center disaster has already generated a tremendous amount of e-mail spam and chain letters. As this article points out, you can count on a lot of hoaxes to be disseminated by e-mail in the next few weeks. Exercise a high degree of caution before you forward an e-mail message to your favorite fifty friends. Be suspicious. People are not grateful to receive messages filled with misinformation, no matter how well-intentioned you are. And an unsolicited message asking for money is very likely to be fraudulent. Be generous, get involved, help your neighbors and our country – but watch your e-mail! […] continued

Hotmail users will notice that the service has been redesigned. I don’t see any important new services, but Microsoft has beefed up the junk mail settings. Everyone will want to bump the junk mail filter from “Low” to “High” to deal with the unbelievable volume of spam that Hotmail seems to attract.

Oh, this is a nasty one. According to this article, Microsoft sends information about its Hotmail subscribers – email address, city, and state – to InfoSpace, an Internet white pages service. InfoSpace then combines this information with the subscribers’ telephone numbers and home addresses. The result is a user database that spam advertisers use to generate junk mail.

Quoted from the article: “Privacy activists say that this Hotmail practice opens subscribers’ email accounts to annoying mass mailings. But Microsoft denies this claim. ‘We’re clearly stating what this is,’ said MSN Product Manager Sarah Lefko. ‘It’s a consumer benefit.’”

“Consumer benefit.” A grown person actually said that out loud. […] continued

I had trouble sending some e-mail during the last few days – messages were being returned as undeliverable, but it was hard to understand why. A couple of other people have mentioned the same thing to me. I don’t know for sure, but this article about a squabble between two major Internet service providers may have the answer. When a critical link between Cable & Wireless and PSINet was cut after some negotiations broke down, a side effect was that parts of the Net became inaccessible for some people. E-mail was bouncing all over. It’s supposed to be over now, although the article’s point is that the same thing can happen again. […] continued

Norton Antivirus offers a feature called “e-mail protection” that I routinely turn off. It’s a service that scans e-mail for viruses as messages come into your system – an appealing idea, but it’s implemented badly. It changes the settings for your POP3 server and frequently prevents e-mail from being retrieved at all. It’s not documented well – an explanatory message should come up when it’s installed. If you turn it off, Norton Antivirus will still scan all files when you open them from an e-mail message, so you don’t lose very much protection. Here’s an article by somebody else who noticed the same problem. […] continued