Trust is Hard to Come By

I've had my Hotmail account since before Microsoft scooped it up years back. I used it for my mail purposes for a long time until GMail came along and blew it out of the water, but I still have the old Hotmail account because some subscriptions and family members still point to it and getting them to update their address books is like pulling teeth.

Like GMail, Hotmail last year implemented an automatic spam blocker that was supposed to prevent my inbox from getting flooded by junk mail and it seemed to be working really well. Then it seemed that junk mail started piling up faster all of a sudden and I noticed it seemed to coincide with the release of the new Windows Live Mail. I suspect, but cannot prove, the Microsoft purposely lowered the capability of the spam blocker on Hotmail to 'encourage' users to migrate to the new system. Since I migrated yesterday, the amount of junk mail in that account has been far less.

There are other explanations but its hard to trust a corporation that has done so many slimy things over the years. One quick example: my system is configured with Firefox as the default browser for all applications but when I open a link from MS Messenger guess what browser pops up? That's right, Internet Exploder. Sigh.

If I had Andrew's technical savvy I would attempt to but a Linux OS on our new computer. If Windows Vista gives us any trouble, I might attempt it anyways.