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Hotmail development team on Reddit

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Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#101

Post by teach »

jrnkntl wrote: post #73
OoTheNigerian wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you go help in an aid program in Africa for a while, you could come home to find 10 years of email deleted." That is more insulting. We have Internet here so you can check your mail.

Please don't play that card. I can imagine that the places that would need some kind of aid program don't have that at hand (f.e. fair parts of Zimbabwe & Tanzania). We all know Nigeria does have the access, and NOFI but a lot of people have suffered from Internet enabled Nigerians through Hotmail ;)

Today, I learned that "NOFI" means "no flame intended". That is, "I'm critiquing, but I do not intend any offense."

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#102

Post by ars »

ekanes wrote: post #66
ars wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 Year. There are many people who make event specific emails addresses. These events are annual, so they use the email yearly.

1 year is still far too short (and only a touch longer than the current 270 days). 5 years is more reasonable. It costs them so very little to keep the data, and it costs people so dearly to lose emotionally important stuff over a technicality.

That's not what I meant.

Email should be kept forever. I meant if you don't log in for a year they can delete the account.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#104

Post by Locke1689 »

dflock wrote: post #60
Locke1689 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I think user accounts are recycled. It's got its benefits and its downsides. I think it will be interesting to see 80 years from now. I guess non-recycled usernames will just get more esoteric?

Yeah, there are a lot of characters in the full unicode set.

There are far fewer human-readable combinations. There are even fewer with fewer than 10 characters.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#105

Post by uniclaude »

joblessjunkie wrote: post #30
twymer wrote: post #23

I think this was a negative PR move. Did they really think coming on reddit and saying things like this would be beneficial? I don't see any evidence in this that they actually care about peoples feedback. They just keep getting defensive about their decisions of deleting peoples email, not supporting IMAP etc.

There's no such thing as bad press. I've read the name "Hotmail" more times today than I had in the past 6 months.

True, today was the first time I logged in my hotmail account since last summer. On the other hand, what I read on this thread made me understand why I haven't open this mailbox for months.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#106

Post by Locke1689 »

dstein wrote: post #58
Locke1689 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example? They may be skirting around saying something straight out for legal reasons (either proprietary or getting sued by a competitor).

* Would it have killed you to have included a built-in spellchecker? For IE9 we really focused on what customers, partners and developers told us mattered most, their sites. Developers wanted the ability to create richer and more immersive experiences on the web, and so we invested in fully HW accelerating HTML5 through Windows. * Why no Websockets support? We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites…

First, yes, it's in "professional speak." Given that some people from marketing are overseeing this, I would just expect that. The answers, however, don't strike me as condescending.

For IE9 we really focused on what customers, partners and developers told us mattered most, their sites. Developers wanted the ability to create richer and more immersive experiences on the web, and so we invested in fully HW accelerating HTML5 through Windows.

Dev translation: we actually tested this. People didn't care enough about built-in spellcheck.

We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used. In IE9, we set out to support the standards that showed up among those sites. We also spoke to developers and partners to understand what they were going do in the future and what they couldn't do today

I don't even have anything to add to this. They looked at who's using websockets and the standard. No one is using it. In fact, I don't see why IE is getting a bad rap for this -- none of the browsers currently have websockets enabled while the standard is being fixed. The rest of their comment is marketing-translated: "We do care about standards though, which is why we implemented the more common ones."

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#107

Post by Locke1689 »

btilly wrote: post #82
Locke1689 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not. Do you actually know any Microsoft developers? It's just impolite for people at Microsoft to say: "Reddit says it wants this feature but we haven't implemented this feature. Why? Because we have done a massive user study in the past year on this and there are fewer than 1% of users (power users only) who actually care."

What you say is probably true, but it is severely broken. Let me give an example. If you talk to users, very few will care that IE doesn't support key web standards that every other major browser does, because everyone is going to make things work on IE anyways. However if you talk to users, lots care that it is easy to develop rich web content. However the users don't have the perspective to understand that standard…

I think you're being unfair. You act as though they aren't implementing any standards instead of just the ones that make a difference. At the end of the day, websockets is a mess and shouldn't (and isn't) be enabled in any web browser yet. But a whole bunch of other things are. Check the compatibility list: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ff468705.aspx. They actually have pretty solid support for most of the upcoming standards and are playing a significant role in the W3C process itself.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#108

Post by potatolicious »

ars wrote: post #102
ekanes wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 year is still far too short (and only a touch longer than the current 270 days). 5 years is more reasonable. It costs them so very little to keep the data, and it costs people so dearly to lose emotionally important stuff over a technicality.

That's not what I meant. Email should be kept forever. I meant if you don't log in for a year they can delete the account.

I disagree. I can see them freezing the account - i.e. rejecting further mail to it. But if I come back after a year, I fully expect to be able to say "hey guys, I'm back, can I have my emails now?" and get at it.

Data storage is ludicrously cheap that I don't understand why there's a need at all.

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#109

Post by potatolicious »

ry0ohki wrote: post #95

It's pretty sad that Hotmail is trying to reach out to the tech community, and their comments and getting so far down voted on Reddit (-500 for one comment at time of writing this)

I dislike the downvoting too, but there's a reason for it. People are raising valid critiques about Hotmail (that the Hotmail team specifically asked for!) and their only response was "well, why would anyone want all of that anyways?"

They're clueless, that's why they're getting downvoted. Re: their complete and utter cluelessness when it comes to IMAP support, someone basically summarized up the reasoning in a single sentence, that the Hotmail team hasn't realized in years of managing this product:

"ActiveSync? srsly? Does it work with my Android phone? With an iPhone? With anything else than Windows?"

Re: Hotmail development team on Reddit

#110

Post by mediaman »

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #68
cryptoz wrote: post #3

I found the much more insulting thing on that thread was the Hotmail developers' insistence that user's emails should be deleted after 270 days of inactivity. This point was brought up many times (well, about the old 30-day or 90-day limits), and all the devs said was "we fixed that! it used to be 30, now it's 270". That is so incredibly insulting. If you go help in an aid program in Africa for a while, you could com…

"If you go help in an aid program in Africa for a while, you could come home to find 10 years of email deleted." That is more insulting. We have Internet here so you can check your mail.

There are still many remote parts of North America that do not have Internet access, either.

I've had friends spend weeks on trips to rural Sierra Leone, and guess what? There's no running water, much less Internet access.

That's not the same as saying wherever you live in Africa has no modern facilities including the Internet.

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