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Eric Lai's picture
Eric Lai

Regarding Redmond

Welcome to Hotmail Hell!

For those who prefer not to taint their view of Microsoft's technical support as bureaucratic and incompetent with evidence that it may merely be helpful, albeit in a late-by-ten-years sorta way, here's a good story.

Susan Bradley is an accountant and techie from Fresno, Calif. She is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Small Business Server who blogs as the "SBS Diva."

The writing is as lively and funny as I've ever seen at a technical blog. Some of the popular tags include "evil things," "rants" and "Stupid Blonde moments."

Being an MVP has not neutered Bradley, who is well-known in Microsoft circles for not pulling her punches with Redmond.

Earlier this month, the Diva had a problem with her Hotmail account. Through a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article, she found that if she e-mailed support@hotmail.com she should expect an answer within 24 business hours. But when she did so, she got back an automated reply with the money phrase "This is not a monitored address."

Trying to click on Help through Hotmail directly led to the same automated response.

"Welcome to Hotmail Hell," wrote another Microsoft MVP, Robear Dyer, in reply. His advice, if you need technical support, is to go to this page: http://support.live.com/eform.aspx

Got any tales of Hotmail Hell or other Microsoft support incompetence to share?

What People Are Saying

Hotmail has had a bug for

Hotmail has had a bug for the last 5 weeks, where the References: header is corrupted by excess newlines when it has more than one entry (i.e. a reply to a reply). As a result, receiving email clients correctly interpret the headers below the newlines as part of the body, and the Content-type:quoted-printable header isn't received, so punctuation marks are displayed as their ASCII codes (=2C for comma, etc).

The first-level help people (or maybe they're bot scripts) who post at http://windowslivehelp.com/community/4.aspx didn't even realize that people have been reported this exact bug every day for a month, so they keep telling people to "optimize their browser", and asking their same dumb questions.

Eventually someone from the Hotmail engineering team posted and said he reported the bug, but it still hasn't been fixed.

More Hotmail Horror

I have had a hotmail account for years, 8 to be exact. I have only changed email addresses once through them. However, I haven't been able to login to Hotmail for MONTHS and have been unable to contact them to solve the problem. The lack access to my hotmail account has caused me to have to re-create other accounts and/or loose access to those accounts and files. It all started one day when I was trying to update some of my information (password, state, zip code, alternate email, etc). Once I did this it said it was sending an email to my alternate address to confirm, unfortunately it sent it to my OLD alternate, which had been expired for almost 2 years. Apparently, because I didn't respond/confirm the changes I am no longer able to access my account & there is no one to help me!

Any suggestions on how to retrieve my account?

That is why I don't rely

That is why I don't rely 100% on free service as an important communication tool, it might be handy at times but I rather some of these for a much more controllable solution.