For all of you who switched to Hotmail after steaming over .Mac

I'd rather buy a domain name for $1 a month and run my own email server than supporting Apple's let's-play-Microsoft-and-monopolize-the-Mac-platform strategy.
 
I'm pretty sure he meant $4.17 a month... and it's not $99 a year, it's $50 right now. (Well, actually, $49.95, but that nickel doesn't make a big difference)
 
Originally posted by ksv
I'd rather buy a domain name for $1 a month and run my own email server than supporting Apple's let's-play-Microsoft-and-monopolize-the-Mac-platform strategy.
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I'll gladly pay that extra $3.17 a month and get 100 MB of free disk space, and the ability NOT to have to set up and do my own e-mail server.

:shrug: Whatever floats your boat.

Yeah, and I meant $4.17 a month... I always do that. :\
 
Originally posted by ElDiabloConCaca
I'm pretty sure he meant $4.17 a month... and it's not $99 a year, it's $50 right now. (Well, actually, $49.95, but that nickel doesn't make a big difference)
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If you were going to lease a TV for 5 years, would you go for the shop charging $50 the first year and $100 the four other years, or would you go for the one charging 75$ all 5 years?
 
Originally posted by simX


I'll gladly pay that extra $3.17 a month and get 100 MB of free disk space, and the ability NOT to have to set up and do my own e-mail server.

:shrug: Whatever floats your boat.

Yeah, and I meant $4.17 a month... I always do that. :\
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I'd actually rather pay $30 extra every month for a 1 Mbit SDSL line and get my whole HD online for free :p

BTW, when you pay $8.25 per month for .Mac, are the 100 MBs of storage free?
And, when you pay $129 for Mac OS X, are the applications that come with it free?
 
Does anyone know if there is still a bandwidth limit on .Mac sites like there was with iTools? Because if there was, then the whole reason to host sites on it (in my case anyway) is gone.
 
Originally posted by ksv


I'd actually rather pay $30 extra every month for a 1 Mbit SDSL line and get my whole HD online for free :p

BTW, when you pay $8.25 per month for .Mac, are the 100 MBs of storage free?
And, when you pay $129 for Mac OS X, are the applications that come with it free?
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When I pay $4.17 a month for .Mac, the 100 MB of storage is included in the fee. I regard .Mac as payment for the awesome iApps, so in my mind the online storage is free, yes.

And when you pay $129 for Mac OS X, the applications come with the operating system and are included in the price.

I think you're misconstruing my definition of "free". In this context, I meant something like "to boot". It's an added bonus that certainly could have been left out.

Oh, and about that TV. If I ever wanted to get a TV, I'd lease a TV from the first guy for $50 for the first year, and then go to the guy who leases it for $75 the other four years. After all, this "TV" (i.e.: .Mac) is paid for on a yearly basis and there is no commitment.

Snowball: I'd guess there is probably still a bandwidth limit, but probably not as stringent as it was with iTools.
 
If I wanted to get screwed, I'd sign up for .mac.

If I wanted to get screwed twice, I'd sign up for Hotmail's free email service.

Here's my reasoning.

.mac and the 100MB iDisk is a joke. How many people are on dialup? If you do use iDisk, are you going to be uploading and downloading large files to use up that 100MB? No. Even with broadband it would be insanely slow to sync large files. iDisk should be 5-10MB at most for the only thing you're going to use it for at home, syncing documents and preferences.

So you're a novice homepage builder. Are you really going to be using 100MB of storage? No. You'll use 5-10MB and be happy. Sure, when you're a webpage pro you'll likely use more but hopefully by then you'll be smart enough to get your own domain and host for a lot cheaper.

As for Hotmail. After Microsoft aquired Hotmail it slowly became a joke. Storage size was cut, a pay service was implemented, an expiration time was set and most recently, Microsoft has the audacity to delete emails without giving prior warning to users. Pretty screwed up in my opinion.

If I had a choice though, give me Hotmail at $1.70 a month, $20 anually rather than .mac at $8.30 a month, $100 anually anyday. Sure, if you're switching from your already upgraded iTools, .mac it's only $50 the first year but that isn't the case for most users.

Now until Apple can offer a toned down .mac service for around what Microsoft charges for Hotmail, how in the hell can you say it's any better? It's just not.

I don't want to here "crappy interface" BS because Hotmail has a great UI. The one time I tried using iTools it was terribly slow and I recently signed up for a .mac trial and guess what, it's still terribly slow. Sure, the UI is nice but no better than Hotmail for what I use it for and if it takes several minutes to load with broadband, Apple can keep their .mac service.

iDisk was also slow. it was nice uploading a few small files but I'd never consider uploading anything over 1MB.

I'm not going to drink the Koolaid on this one and pretend .mac is worth. For certain users, sure, it may very well be but for it's target audiance, it's a ripoff.

I'm not going to pretend Hotmail has all the answers either. It's free email service is crap but their pay service is pretty nice and integrates with Windows quite nicely.

If people had any sense they would ditch .mac and switch to Hotmail or another webmail service for a hell of a lot cheaper.
 
Originally posted by azosx
As for Hotmail. After Microsoft aquired Hotmail it slowly became a joke. Storage size was cut, a pay service was implemented, an expiration time was set and most recently, Microsoft has the audacity to delete emails without giving prior warning to users. Pretty screwed up in my opinion.

If I had a choice though, give me Hotmail at $1.70 a month, $20 anually rather than .mac at $8.30 a month, $100 anually anyday. Sure, if you're switching from your already upgraded iTools, .mac it's only $50 the first year but that isn't the case for most users.
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Keep in mind as well that having hotmail makes you have a .NET account. This to me was one of the worst parts of M$ buying Hotmail. Also, M$ recently changed everyone's setting so that they could give our em@il address out (or sell it). If you don't believe me, search the macminute archives for anything in the last 2 months concerning hotmail: when I read it, I checked, and sure enough the box I know was checked in my settings for hotmail was now unchecked.
 
Originally posted by sheepguy42

Keep in mind as well that having hotmail makes you have a .NET account. This to me was one of the worst parts of M$ buying Hotmail. Also, M$ recently changed everyone's setting so that they could give our em@il address out (or sell it). If you don't believe me, search the macminute archives for anything in the last 2 months concerning hotmail: when I read it, I checked, and sure enough the box I know was checked in my settings for hotmail was now unchecked.
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This isn't completely true. .NET is not implemented on Windows 95, 98, ME or 2000. .NET is only integrated with XP. I think you can download an update to implement .NET on 2000 but I've never tried it. On XP I believe you can choose whether to save passwords and personal info with .NET or not as well. I only used XP for a few days before going to back 2000 Advanced Server. .NET was one of the feature that made me wary of it.

eBay, Yahoo and just about everyone else who has millions of users at their disposal like to change user preferences. If anyone would take the time to read the EULA, you'd see by agreeing to it, you've given them every right to do so. Your bank and telephone provider do it as well. This doesn't make it right but MS is not the only culprit.

Also, I checked my free Hotmail and none of my sent emails had been deleted. However, in the Sent Messages folder, it does state, "Messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted from this folder." How long that notice has been posted, I don't know. If the emails in that person's folder were so important, perhaps they should have paid better attention to their account. Anyway, I just made a new folder and moved them to there. No big deal.

If Hotmail has you worried, there are many other webmail and storage solutions a lot cheaper and just as useful as .mac.
 
Originally posted by azosx

This isn't completely true. .NET is not implemented on Windows 95, 98, ME or 2000. .NET is only integrated with XP. I think you can download an update to implement .NET on 2000 but I've never tried it. On XP I believe you can choose whether to save passwords and personal info with .NET or not as well. I only used XP for a few days before going to back 2000 Advanced Server. .NET was one of the feature that made me wary of it.
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I never said you have to use .NET, just that your hotmail account name and password are not just for hotmail: M$ automatically sets every hotmail account up w/ .NET accounts with the same name & password. And if you don't pelieve me, look at the signout graphic:
dosoEN.gif

Now if you can find a Hotmail account that was created and only used on Win95, try to use it's name and password to login to Ebay's .net login page. BTW, it also gives you MSN Messenger access.
My problem with this is that I was purposely trying to NOT have a .NET account, but M$ is so pervasive that I now have one against my will and better judgement.
I would also like to point out that yes, .NET is not integrated already into Win95, 98, ME or 2000 initially, but anyone doing a Windows Update can fix that at least as far back as 98.
 
I will not sign up for .mac unless Apple offers an email-only option for $10/year (or less). Here's why:
- Free POP3 email accounts here. The ads they send you come only about once per week, and are easy to filter out.
- Free website up to 20MB here. They do put a banner ad on each web page, but I can live with that.
I will miss the ease of using iDisk, but I have set up a small FTP server on my machine. It ain't that hard to do.
IMHO, Apple are shooting themselves in the foot by imposing a pricing policy that will make a lot of people drop their mac.com email addy.
 
Originally posted by ksv
I'd rather buy a domain name for $1 a month and run my own email server than supporting Apple's let's-play-Microsoft-and-monopolize-the-Mac-platform strategy.
Click to expand...

$1/month for a domain name? I've never seen that. Still, assuming that is correct. Couple that with the cheapest web/email hosting I have ever seen: $3/month (www.rtshosting.com) and your are at $4/month, and here is what you get:

- 10 MB of storage
- 1 email account

But you do NOT get some of the nifty integration like iDisk (mounting on your Desktop), slick website/iPhoto publishing, calendar synch (coming soon), etc.

All for $4/month savings (.mac is $8/month).

The point here is that .mac is NOT really unreasonable.

Remember, those "free" sites are NOTE free...there is a cost of SOME kind. Just a matter of what cost your are willing to pay.
 
Another user that I know that has hotmail noticed a change in his account recently. The option to check other POP accounts has been removed from the free email accounts and has been moved over to the pay subscribers.

Maybe they say that if apple can charge for it why not them?

I'm starting to get over my initial anger with Apple, but still do not plan to get an DOTMAC account.

But people should get what suits them. A free email account is what suits me.
 
Another reason not to use Hotmail

Another user that I know that has hotmail noticed a change in his account recently. The option to check other POP accounts has been removed from the free email accounts and has been moved over to the pay subscribers.

Maybe they say that if apple can charge for it why not them?
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Hotmail took away POP3 from their non paying subscribers several months ago. I never use webmail with POP3 anyway.

The only reason I use webmail in the first place is if someone were to swipe my notebook, they wouldn't have access to all my personal information. There is very little on my notebook that could be used to trace it back to me or someone I know.

With my ISP, I get 6 webmail/POP3 accounts with 20MB of storage a piece. This is pretty common now-a-days, especially with broadband subscribers. Maybe if Apple offered a good dialup with .mac it'd be worth it but as far as I'm concerned, it's a huge waste of money.

I'm pretty sure this service is going to be about as popular as iPhoto was. I'm sure Apple is just cashing in on all those $20 digital photo albums. :rolleyes:

In anycase, if in several months Apple offers a free .mac service or at least a toned down, less expensive version, we'll know things didn't work out for them. Sort of like the education only eMac. I think they sold 6 in the first 3 weeks. Just kidding but that was another great Apple marketing idea as well.
 
Actually, I was pretty mad about the switch from POP3. they offer now another option so that Outlook can check Hotmail, but it's not POP3. That seems like .wmv and .wma to me, it doesn't do anything but lock me to MS software.
That was the exact time I stopped using my Hotmail account and started using iTools
 
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