Hotmail has descended slowly, without note, into a state of completely unuseability. The problems are with accessing messages, sending emails, and dreaded blue screen of email death: "The Server Is Too Busy". Hey Gates, I know you're a busy guy, but can't you even make servers that have time to talk to me?

There are spattered posts in assorted newsgroups with theories as to possible causes of Hotmail's problems. They range from 1) a recent merger with Sympatico, to 2) recent increase in mailbox storage size or to 3) Hotmail being spammed to death.

Let's deal with each one in turn: 1) Sure Hotmail did merge with Sympatico, but so what? Why would that destroy mail functionality? Shouldn't that mean *more* resources, not less?

2) As for increase in mailbox size, perhaps Microsoft has bitten off more than it can chew. Being a software architect, I understand that it's quite easy to design systems that don't scale well. Perhaps Microsoft's capitalistic business model of small email boxes with a fee for a slightly larger one led to an architecture that doesn't hold water in free love of storage world. Microsoft faces stiff competition from Yahoo mail which offers 250 megabytes and GMail (by Google) which offers a luxurious 1 gigabyte of storage. This competition forced them to ratchet up their alloted email inbox sizes from a miserly 1 megabyte to 250 megabytes. This 250 time increase, across a wide user base in very short order is very likely cause of our current woes.

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