Brownstar

Gah! During the day yesterday I received a dodgy email, supposedly from my Hotmail account about some chinese website or other. I could also see that it had been sent to everyone in my contact list.

Got home, checked my Hotmail and someone had set up an 'on vacation' message that was sent to all my contacts and they had also deleted my contacts!!!!!!!!! :curse::curse:

Checked the Hotmail help pages and it appears to be a major issue with Hotmail at present being attacked by Malware. The advice is to change all your security questions and your password.

Still waiting to see if Hotmail can get my contacts back, thinking of using my gmail instead now but that will be a pain as I've used Hotmail for 10 years or so!

If you have Hotmail, be wary and change your details now!

el_richo

I recently had this. I only found out when i checked my hotmail and there was an ebay password change request confirmation that had been read. I know it wasn't me. The best thing to do is immediately change EVERY password you have on EVERYTHING.

I always use GMAIL for official and important stuff. General subscriptions and messing around is done via hotmail.

One thing to note is that people really should change their passwords regularly.

Alberta_Rose

The same thing happened to me last November, I couldn't find who to report it to ..... it made me so mad!

I use gmail now as well. My hotmail account now gets about 70-80 spam a week since that happened! :curse:

ExcitedBrit

I would like to ask a question about the reliability of gmail. I am seriously considering using gmail as my main email for official stuff, I like the fcat that you can acess your emails via microsoft outlook and so on. I know this is possible with hotmail too but i have outlook 2002 and hotmail needs more recent version. Gmail works with outlook 2002.

Was wonndering how safe and ethical is gmail since on wikipedia or on some otehr site I read that they may access your email for marketting purposes etc? would anyone share their experiences please?

thank you

Canada2006

gmail is the gold standard of webmail.

Very rarely does it go down.

The marketing messages are for your benefit so no ethical problems there. I never notice them to be honest.

To migrate to gmail, you can access your hotmail account via pop and have all your hotmail e-mails imported into gmail, past and future. It helps with the transition.

ExcitedBrit

Thank you for your thoughts. have just gotten familiar with gmail, opened an account for my parents and made it available through microsoft outlook to make things easier.

Took me two days to teach my mom how to use outlook- even had to write down notes the one one days when doing task analysis!

I find the webmail interface of gmail a pain though. but once its connected to outlook its ok

Cape Blue

I have a gmail account (amongst others) and whilst i find it pretty reliable, I have to say that I find the whole "labels" thing pretty tedious (i use it as a webmail) - having used outlook, hotmail and other packages for the past 15-20 years I prefer storing my old emails in a structure of folders and subfolders. To be honest its the one thing that puts me off using it more.

clynnog

I find the labels idea great once you use it and I don't think I could go back to the Outlook folders idea...I also find gmail easy to search for old emails.

With Outlook, I lost about 50% of my emails once when I exceeded the Outlook total file size (I was at 2 gb I think)...with gmail you can use up to 7.3 gb w/o any issues.

Cape Blue

I use Outlook every day at work (my job is remotely based and quite email intensive) and I also have two webmail accounts - hotmail as my old personal account and one at UK2.net as it is related to a sideline business I run, all of these use folders.

On the Outlook size, I use pst's and back them up periodically to manage the size - work's exchange server has a limit of far less than 2Gb anyway.

I'm sure once you get used to the labels deal it is OK, just that I work every day in folders and have my sideline email in folders and am not sufficiently interested in labels to want to learn a new storage method.

Greenhill

That size limitation of 2GB was Outlook 2002 (xp) and before. 2003 onwards increased it (20Gig) but archiving, managing multiple PSTs and backing up is really something an Outlook user should do regularly if they have any important data in there.

The problem with the older versions (and this is the same with Outlook Express) is that, if the maximum file size is exceeded, then data corruption will occur (without warning). The newer versions of Outlook (03,07) might give a warning that the file is full, but really... what's that thing they say about "all eggs in one basket"??!

Also, deleting emails doesn't make the file smaller, it just flags the email for removal during the compacting process.

Souvenir

I use Outlook as my default and can access my emails via VPN when I'm travelling but I find gmail way better when you're stuck in a hotel room somewhere. Very fast.

Cape Blue

My work system no longer requires me to use a VPN to get Outlook when travelling - quite nifty as the VPN is normally quite slow.

clynnog

That happened to me w/o warning...I think I was at 2.03 gb or something like that and it basically purged itself down to 1.4 gb, thereby losing the most recent 0.63 gb of data...I went to my work colleague's office and forwarded many of the lost emails that he had to my newly created gmail account and haven't used the outlooks system since.