5 reasons I dislike Windows Live Hotmail

I have nothing against Hotmail. Except may be the fact that I’m kinda being forced to send mail to it because everybody else has already started using it. This makes it something bad from a sender’s point of view. Here are a few reasons why I dislike windows live hotmail:

The very first reasons why you should switch is because it offers only 2MB or storage space. Although it does offer mail in HTML, 2MB I think is too low. Don’t believe me? Click on screenshot below to enlarge.

Okay, so it might not be true that hotmail offers 2MB of e-mail storage… they just apparently need to update their description tag on Google (or perhaps it’s Google’s sense of humour?) Because as it turns out, Yahoo and Live.com each have different descriptions of the website.

Nevertheless, here are some more reasons for which I dislike Hotmail with a passion:

1. It only allows 10 MB e-mail attachments! What?!?! Most e-mail providers out there have atleast 20 MB attachment limits. This means that I can send a 20MB attachment (like I often do) to a person using Gmail or Yahoo Mail – but I can’t send it to a person using Hotmail/Windows Live Mail. How annoying is that?
2. No Mac/Linux Mail App Support. – Unfortunately, Windows Live Hotmail and even Hotmail are inaccessible from Mail.app or Entourage or even Thunderbird on a Mac. Why? Because Microsoft wants people to use Windows Live Mail. No seriously. That’s the only reason I can think of for not having some kind of POP/SMTP Structure to allow people with a Mac/Linux OS to use hotmail with an e-mail client of their choice, Yes, I realize that there are ways to run hotmail on a mac with Apple Mail, but they’re too inefficient.
3. Annoying vertical banner advertising that takes up too much space and is just plain annoying. Enough said.
   
4. It’s slower than other webmail applications out there – especially on platforms other than a Windows PC. For some reason whenever I try to open a mail message, it seems like it’s way too tardy to be even considered as good as Hotmail. Plus, using folders is so slow that it’s almost inefficient.
5. Embedded advertisements inside e-mails! Wow, this is just great. First, they stick you with annoying banner ads, and then they even add messages to advertise their services inside e-mails sent from hotmail.

Honestly, if Hotmail would like to compete with other service providers then they’d better improve their standards.