So, in the course of moving, looking for a new place and other travails I have not checkes some of my less frequently used email accounts.

In most cases this just means I have a lot of unread mail (nearly 8000 once for my poor Earthlink account which had gone unchecked for a long time) but in the case of Hotmail this meant that tonight, when I went to check whether or not Hotmail was down (my girlfriend was having problems accessing her account), instead I got the “do you want to activate your account” message.

This is annoying on so many levels I can’t be begin to count them.

For one - it means that ALL of my messages which had been there (notes from Microsoft about past registrations via Passport, one email list I was subscribed to which contains writings by a very good friend of mine and a few other things which honestly I don’t recall at the moment but which I saved for a reason).

For another it is completely counter to how most other companies handle data in the modern era. Amazon.com remembers EVERY transaction I’ve made with them - even books I bought from them way back in the mid-90’s.

Yahoo! as well preserves (as best I can tell) my emails for a very long time - and I can still pull up mail and notes I posted to Yahoo! services back in the mid-90’s (copies of my old resume I uploaded to their briefcase, photos I uploaded long before they purchased Flickr etc)

For that matter the fact that Hotmail offers just 250 meg while gmail and Yahoo! each offer essentially unlimited storage for most users points to vastly different understandings of the usefullness of data retention and “mail as memory”. (could this be an after effect of Microsoft’s various lawsuits and legally discovered damaging emails?)

To my mind an online service should NEVER delete my data without first asking me about it (and no, sending an email to an account which I haven’t checked in a while is not ‘asking me’ about it - so in that case, don’t delete the account and certainly not after just 30 days).

In fact I thought that they had changed this policy, which is partially why I had not checked the account in a while, but apparently I was very mistaken.

I know that running email servers to handle mail for countless inactive accounts is painful (and the spam loads vast and very heavy) but it is also the price of doing business and it is how I think these things should work.

30 days in any case is not a very long period of time - especially not in Dec/Jan to go without logging into what had always been a lightly used account for me - in the past two months I have been traveling back and forth between Chicago and the Bay Area, I’ve been looking for a new place to live, been working on a number of different projects and in short, have not had a chance to catch up on my less business critical accounts and services.

I did, however, use my “passport” account in other ways - I logged into MSN Messenger via Trillian just a days ago. But apparently that while linked was not linked sufficiently to count.

Perhaps someone at Microsoft working on Hotmail (or the new Live Mail) has something to add? I’ll be sure to ask Robert Scoble about this when I see him next month at the Naked Conversations Launch Party

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.