A few weeks ago, I created once again a Hotmail/MSN account, as it’s a quite convenient way to get a discardable IM + e-mail account. Then, I eventually found out that I rather liked this account and would like to keep this alias to use it with Gmail.
I thought: no problem, I just need to configure Gmail to allow sending as myaccount@hotmail.com, and to configure hotmail to forward my e-mails to Gmail. Of course, I had naively forgotten that Hotmail is run by Micro$$$$oft. Guess what? My e-mails are trapped, they just can’t get out of Microsoft clusters:
You can forward your mail to one other e-mail address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, or is part of Windows Live Custom Domains.
At this point I knew that the long term result is that I’ll drop this alias. Still, I wanted to know more about this “Windows Live Custom Domains” thing. First, when arriving on their site, I found it’d been renamed:
Windows Live Admin Center
Windows Live Custom Domains is now Windows Live Admin Center
Yeah, apparently, Microsoft aren’t able to update their error messages as fast as they rename their services. But never mind. Willing to make sure this service was free, I tried to open the service for my domain:
Quite funny, Windows Live thinks the name “wiki4games” is inappropriate. On the other side, “patheticcockroach” (which gave me some problems on quite a few sites with misconfigured filters – even, a while ago, on Wikipedia) is appropriate… Whatever…
Haha, yeah thats right, hotmail, and anything Micro$oft tends to try being a trap. If they didn’t try so hard, they might get HAPPIER CUSTOMERS!
What they should be focusing on is support and reliability, not trapping people into their crappy services.
Advance your services Microsoft, don’t try trapping, as it sure it crapping.
Sorry for the very late approval. There is a problem with the e-mail notifications: I just don’t get them :/ (and when I get them, they go to the spam folder :/)
I put my work and personal emails over to MSN and then had to apologize to everyone and move them back to Gmail.
Reasons not to use MSN:
the forwarding issue as above;
remember my password – it doesn’t;
remember my username – it doesn’t;
spamguard – it doesn’t;
but most of all, the tacky tabloid hotmail news and sports pages, which double up when you move from one account to another, so you end up with half a dozen of the things on the taskbar.
deeply annoying.
Hi David,
Thank you for your post.
I added a reference to it in an article I just wrote.
(Drop me a line in case you don’t like being linked!)
Cheers!
You’re welcome. And who doesn’t like being linked to anyway? 🙂 I like your Greenpeace Green graph too, I hate the Wii so much 😀
I’m so jealous you got an avatar… I really need to find a decent avatar plugin there…