Hotmail security upgrade: too little, too late

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Hotmail’s slipshod security was the main reason I jumped ship from Microsoft’s webmail service way back in 2005. Dealing with an inbox stuffed full of unfiltered spam, phishing attacks and other malicious messages was about as much fun as picking hair out of the plughole. In Wormwood Scrubs.

I kept my account open because various website registrations were still linked to that account, but I’ve seen nothing to tempt me back into regular use. Quite the opposite in fact. In the past few months alone, both a colleague at work and my girlfriend have had their Hotmail accounts hijacked and used to send malicious links to everyone in their address book.  Microsoft insists this problem is industry-wide, but I’ve never seen a Gmail account hacked in such a manner.

Microsoft knows this is a serious problem: today it’s announced a series of “upgrades” to Hotmail’s security… that don’t go anywhere near far enough, in my opinion.

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Switching from Hotmail to Gmail

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Last week I decided to take the plunge and switch from Hotmail to Gmail. I’ve been flirting with the idea for a while, tempted by the never-ending upgrades and conversation-view email layout. The thing that had always held me back was that I’ve been a Hotmail user for over ten years. There were a lot of emails in that account that I didn’t want to lose, so I procrastinated. Which was daft, because switching is incredibly easy and you don’t have to lose a thing. It goes a bit like this.

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How to break the Google monopoly

Friday, July 18th, 2008

You may not have noticed this, but Google is quite a dominant company. Chances are that almost everyone you know has a Google email account, a sign-in for Google Docs, and uses its search engine every day. So you do have to wonder how anyone is going to break its stranglehold – something I asked one of its email competitors today.

The chances are that you will have heard of GMX, but the chances are that you also won’t have used its services. (more…)