Hating Hotmail.

I hate Hotmail these days. Shall I say it again, only louder?

I HATE HOTMAIL.

There’s so much going on all the time – ‘downloading’ this, ‘connecting to’ that, ‘transferring’ such and such, scratching its arse in an agitated manner while it thinks of something else to slow down my computer. That’s what it does: slows everything down. I use Firefox and like the way the tabs operate, but I’ll never leave Hotmail open in one of them unless it’s necessary. Pain in the bloody proverbial, it is.

And ever since they started separating ‘Reply’ e-mails into packages, it doesn’t work properly. Once you get to the third or fourth reply, Hotmail bounces it back to you as an incoming e-mail and the recipient doesn’t get it.

But, the worst thing: the big advertising panel they have at the side, often obscuring things you want to see. It jumps, moves, shakes, distracts you horribly. There’s a ‘close ad’ button, which I use all the time without even looking at the advert because it’s so annoying, Problem is, every time you do anything, like opening, moving or deleting an e-mail, back comes the ad. So you have to keep closing it. And then, every fourth or fifth time you do that, another message box pops up inviting you to upgrade to the pro version where there are fewer ads.

So let’s get this right. They want me to pay them money to stop showing me adverts. Makes a kind of sense, I suppose, times being what they are.

I’ve had Hotmail as my main account for twelve years, and have seen a gradual trend grind inexorably on. Every time they make their ‘improvements,’ it just gets worse and worse.

Yes, I know I could just use another e-mail account, but that isn’t the point. The point is, why does MSN have to be such a pain? What do they gain from it?