Some Hotmail Accounts Wiped 298
tomhudson writes "PC Magazine reports that many Hotmail accounts have lost all their emails. Users' entire email histories have apparently been lost. 'Users can still log in sans issue. However, they arrive at empty inboxes: No custom folders, no messages in "Sent" or "Deleted," nothing. As one might expect, the abruptness (and unexpectedness) of the purge has left some of Hotmail's long-time users a bit in the dark.'"
Re:Long term hotmail users? (Score:5, Informative)
use gmail, then use thunderbird to dl (without deleting from server) and something like mozbackup
Re:How many nines, again? (Score:4, Informative)
How many "nines" did Microsoft promise with their supposed reliability?
Zero for non-paid accounts. There is no SLA for free accounts, same as with gmail.
Anyway, this was not a technology failure, but the result of a Hotmail's inactivity policy. Which is clearly described on their site.
Not Microsoft's first fuck-up with Hotmail (Score:5, Informative)
When MS acquired Hotmail, they tried to move from BSD to Windows/IIS, and failed (back then, anyway) miserably. Then they poured shitloads of commercials and bling into the UI of Hotmail. Finally, they intorduced a rather draconian policy, whereby if you didn't access your account in 30 days, you were locked out. Since I hated the commercials and the bling, I had a hiatus in Hotmail use, and got locked out. I also could NOT re-create the same account name, even if nobody was using it. Anyhow, I was locked out until that day when an exploit ("hack") was discovered, with which anyone could access anyone else's account, without supplying a password. Does anyone remember those happy days? So, I "hacked" into my own account. And yes, the account was there, with all the e-mails. Why the lock-out policy? I dunno, one of the many brainfarts generating from MS.
I remember opening my colleague's account and calling him over, just to show him it was possible. That was the last day he ever used Hotmail.
Re:Do you have any idea? (Score:2, Informative)
"sans issue" means "no exit" in French. So it is briefly confusing to anyone who understands a bit of French to use it to mean "without any problems". The trouble is that you don't know how much French the writer is trying to use, and might even think they are trying to say "Users can log in but not log out again". (And the use of issue to mean problem, though widely accepted, is still non-compliant with most dictionaries; it more properly means an outcome or consequence, or a matter for discussion - without the negative connotations)
They used to do this on purpose (Score:5, Informative)
Until one day in '04, when I logged in after having taken a bit of a break from the online world. It was the first time I'd logged in to my Hotmail in a month, so I expected there to be quite a lot of mail. There were plenty of new messages, but all of my old email was gone!!!!
I freaked out for a while, then read through the "terms of service" or whatever they were calling it at the time. Seems they had silently implemented a policy whereby they delete ALL of your email if you fail to log in for 30 days. Ten years worth of email GONE!!
I suppose they were trying to provide incentives for people to log in to their Hotmail more regularly, but it all it motivated me to do was to open a Gmail account immediately.
Sure, it was a free service with no guarantees. Perhaps I should have been making backups of my precious emails. Thing is, this was not something they did by mistake. This was a policy that they willfully implemented. They chose to punish their subscribers. I don't get it.
Microsoft sucks.
Re:Do you have any idea? (Score:4, Informative)
I think you're ignoring an idiomatic detail about the word 'sans'.
In all the usages I can think of, 'sans' refers to something that's a proper subset of something else. For example, "My cable television contract has all the channels sans HBO."
In the original post, it's not clear of what set "issue" is a member. That's jarring to the reader.
Therefore I think the way it was used was at least unpleasant and possibly also unidiomatic. I'd say that made it a bad word choice.
I'd say your explanation is sans basis in fact. The term sans means "without," not "except for." This is true in both the original French and in English. While these are similar, they are not identical.