Hotmail has descended slowly, without note, into a state of completely unuseability. The problems are with accessing messages, sending emails, and the dreaded blue screen of email death: "The Server Is Too Busy".

Hotmail has descended slowly, without note, into a state of completely unuseability. The problems are with accessing messages, sending emails, and the dreaded blue screen of email death: "The Server Is Too Busy". Hey Gates, I know you're a busy guy, but can't you even make servers that have time to talk to me?

There are spattered posts in assorted newsgroups with theories as to the possible causes of Hotmail's problems. They range from 1) a recent merger with Sympatico, to the 2) recent increase in mailbox storage size or to 3) Hotmail being spammed to death.

Let's deal with each one in turn:
1) Sure Hotmail did merge with Sympatico, but so what? Why would that destroy mail functionality? Shouldn't that mean *more* resources, not less?

2) As for the increase in mailbox size, perhaps Microsoft has bitten off more than it can chew. Being a software architect, I understand that it's quite easy to design systems that don't scale well. Perhaps Microsoft's capitalistic business model of small email boxes with a fee for a slightly larger one led to an architecture that doesn't hold water in the free love of storage world. Microsoft faces stiff competition from Yahoo mail which offers 250 megabytes and GMail (by Google) which offers a luxurious 1 gigabyte of storage. This competition forced them to ratchet up their alloted email inbox sizes from a miserly 1 megabyte to 250 megabytes. This 250 time increase, across a wide user base in very short order is very likely the cause of our current woes.

3) Finally, Spam, the bane of email everywhere. Hotmail has made some attempts at handling spam, but they're not quite there yet. Hotmail puts suspected spam email into the junk mail folder. But how does Hotmail basuspect them as spam in the first place? The first time a spam sender sends out a message to many hotmail users, the email is delivered into their inboxes. Users then have to report this email as spam before hotmail even knows the message is spam. By that time the damage is already done. Hundreds or thousands of users have opened that message, bogging down the hotmail servers. Spam senders are also, much smarter than Hotmails filters and simply change words and graphics here and there to appear to be a completely different message. The correct behaviour ought to be, put all messages not in the user's contact list automatically into junk mail. Then the user can remove any messages that weren't junk by adding those people to their contacts list. A convenience would be a display of all addresses in the junk folder that tried to contact you with a brief subject line. This pane would have a simple check box and submit button to allow you to import that person into your contact list.

In the interim, while the software gods jostle for market share supremacy, what are we mere users to do? We really have very little choice. I will email this article to my editor using Gmail, simply because Hotmail is broken. Perhaps our collective use of other web mail providers will light a fire under the Hotmail architects and we can have a workeable solution to this problem soon.

About the Author

Martin Winer is a computer scientist developing http://www.rankyouragent.com  which is a forum for ranking real estate professionals.