Hotmail still not working? Use Chrome to fix it, says MS Microsoft has advised Hotmail users struggling to access their email accounts to surf via Google’s Chrome browser in order to successfully connect to the recently overhauled service. The software vendor finally rolled out its latest version of Hotmail to its 350 million users last week, but since then the company has faced …
Although I use live mail mostly, I do occasionally access my mail by browser, haven't had any problems yet but did have problems previously with computer locking up completely when using mail.
I switched to Microsoft Security essentials for my anti virus which resolved the issue, subsequently found AVG Surf Shield did not like my internet access.
I once saw an anti-virus accuse a subnet mask of being a denial of service attack. Some of us, programmers, should be standing in soup lines.
As far as Mickey Soft's problems go; always test with IE guys. Sure develop in Firefox because it has all the neat debugging tools but afterwords test with IE because that is where the end user will be.
And if you can get it to work (at all) in IE then you have an almost bullet* proof product. . .
*If you have to kill a chicken to make it work then maybe it is pullet proof?
"when I open my Hotmail.
<snip>
I have very important emails"
If your emails are that important, dear user, you really shouldn't be using hotmail for them. Get a real email service. You pays your money and you takes your choice. If you pay nothing, expect to get nothing - anything more is a bonus but should not be relied upon.
I myself don't commit anything of importance to either of my Hotmail accounts.
On the other hand ...........
My pop3 and smtp access to GMail was belly-up from last Saturday to mid-day Monday -- and no, it was NOT at my end.
In the course of looking, during that outage, for a destination to which I could redirect mail from sundry assorted domains I own, I discovered that though the smtp on my Pipex Homecall account works perfectly, the associated pop mailbox wasn't accessible at all. And when it did become available to receive mail it was inaccessible by pop3. Why? Because the server address specified by Pipex Homecall and confirmed by three different (Indian) call-centre droids was wrong. Changing it from the specified pop.homecall.co.uk to pop3.homecall.co.uk made it work.
And we wont' even begin go into the total chaos caused when Breathe took over Zetnet, thousands lost their email permanently and no contact was possible with any helpdesk whatsoever or via email either.
I'm afraid that paid ISPs can be just as much problem as those who provide "free" email facilities.
To get email from any kind of device that supports html web access numb-nuts! Internet cafe, work computers, mates computers, someone else's mobile phone! Infact I thought it was getting rare to actually use an email client for personal email, the benefits outweigh using the likes of outlook.
Seams the hotmail coders have really screwed up, Gmail has worked brilliantly for me from day1, if the connection is slow it says so and offers a html only, low end, low bandwidth option. I would not touch hotmail with a barge pole.
I thought the only reason people had hotmail and yahoo accounts these days was so they could access msn (I refuse to call it windows live whatever-the-nuts it's called) and sign up for spammy forums and news sites?
I always giggle when I see a business that has a hotmail email address as its main contact email addy! Especially when they have a perfectly good website url they could use! Oh and I giggle harder when I see a hotmail address email actually painted on a van or a shop-front sign!
Strange, I get the same giggle when I see a gmail address. My immediate reaction is 'oh, so my email to you is going to be REALLY secure....</sarcasm>'.
Personally, I think email in general needs a total overhaul, the entire system at the moment is as weak as anything.
Where it comes to Live Mail I've found a huge increase in spam to my Inbox. Live seems pretty much incapable of recognising the most obvious of spam messages and crap these days.
I've been unable to read any emails in my Hotmail inbox for the past day or so under the latest release of Firefox; but I'm happy to report that using Chrome *does* fix it here.
Oddly, the new Hotmail interface did work fine for me under FF initially; so something must have changed in the past day or two.
I suspect MS has been playing whack-a-bug™ and broken something. That said, the only thing I can remember that's definitely different is that I upgraded to FF 3.6.8 recently. I'd be curious to hear whether older versions of FF 3.6 work with the new Hotmail?
"My computer completely stalls when I open my Hotmail. Yes, I have the same issue if I use Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Google Chrome. Yes, I have the same problem if I use another computer, and No, I don't see any script errors because my computer freezes as soon as the window is open... but I have very important emails I have needed to reply to for three days now."
I never thought I would be defending Microsoft, and certainly there are probably cases out there where people are having problems, and I haven't used Hotmail in ages. But...
I don't believe the account of the women quoted. If a web page can lock up a browser or lock up a computer and make it completely unresponsive, there's a flaw in the OS and the browser. And there aren't nearly as many flaws as there once were. And somehow, Microsoft has stumbled onto one that affects three different browsers simultaneously? No.
User error is a more likely explanation - at least in the case above. And you have to question the competency of a user who has emails in Hotmail that are so critical.
I believed her right up until "Yes, I have the same problem if I use another computer", assuming up to then that she was using an old PC that just couldn't cope with the idea of New Things. We've all had to explain that one while performing family tech support.
Nope, sorry - pass your nearest BOFH your account credentials and they'll show you it logging in nicely, though you might not see those 'important emails' afterwards.
I do hope you didn't contact M$ for comment using their hotmail account. You might be waiting a while.
Still another story of MS releasing something massive that affects nearly everyone and none of it works for lots of people with little or no support from MS.
Home server, Vista, Win7 (I still have no usb2) and now hotmail. Hasn't this been in the news before, as part of some other rehash / new service?
When I log into my Hotmail account (which I only use for forums and 'dodgy' web site registrations) it all looks absolutely fine on Firefox 3.6.8.
However if I select a mail message to read nothing shows up on the reading pane. This also happens to others in my office.
I also just tried it in IE8 and experienced the same behaviour, with the added bonus that when I tried to log out it said "Couldn't sign you out We couldn't sign you out because your browser is blocking cookies. "
Say wha?
Anyone else experienced these bugs?
I just don't get why people stay with all this rubbish coding. The comment: "Home server, Vista, Win7 (I still have no usb2) and now hotmail" leaves me to ask two questions, 1, Don't you ever learn? 2. Does usb2 mean user servicable brain?
I simply can't understand the mentality of continually buying rubbish.
There is a pretty large number of computer users who can't buy new computers and run old/used ones. I've encountered the fact that all the new browsers scan for the OS type and will bail on the install on the older browsers leaving the users of these somewhat older computers up the creek without a paddle. Therefor creating web-mail that is only compatible with the latest browsers in the last 9-12 months are going to lock out a huge number of web surfers. It's sort of and elitism when you think about it. If you can't afford the latest kit of the year no email and limited surfing for you. This leaves the Internet for only the well to do. Good way to keep the advantages of the Internet out of the hands of those at the economic bottom of things and keep them at the economic bottom.
While I understand your point, even if a little on the loony conspiracy theory side (c'mon, it's not "elitism", it's just that they want to sell more stuff and squeeze people of as much money as possible, i.e. business as usual), I have to point out that I myself do run the latest browsers (except IE and Safari) on an 8 year old computer at home that was donated by a friend who had no more use for it. Everything works fine, even if not as snappy as it is in the dual core computer with 4 GB of RAM I use at work, for example. But I do use an efficient OS.
Just saying.
When world+dog are starting to browse by Wii, smartphone and netbook, what posessed Microsoft to decide to make the Hotmail UI more reliant on fancy features? It's getting harder and slower to use on a reasonably current desktop machine, but the internet is no longer simply for the desktop PC!!!!
Not true.
I am know that companies are funding Linux in a variety of ways but to the end user it is free.
Here is an example of a 'workstation' benchmark (i.e power user) - win7 vs Ubuntu 10.04
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_win7_ws&num=1
I had a similar problem in mid-January this year, when all of a sudden I could not log on to Hotmail (I know, I know, but I just keep it around to monitor some forums, where it will be too much effort on my side to change) or MSN.
I could log on once, but returning from a link, or logging on to Hotmail, would give me an error (this is from Mandriva, using Firefox). Any further attempts to log on would be futile. I duly logged it with them, but then discovered , whilst researching the problem, that I could actually get my mail via Pop3, so I just set it up from a Windows machine and henceforth happily ignored My MSN and Hotmail.
I eventually traced the cause of the problem to a malformed cookie, which I also notified Microsoft of.
When this story broke, I decided to check what the situation was, and lo and behold! I can now once again log on without any problems whatsoever.
Oh, by the way, those who are complaining must just show some restraint and patience: Microsoft finally responded in April, to tell me that they are looking into the problem. It was still not working at that time, though and, as said above, I could live without logging on.
Hotmail works fine for me on IE 8. Facebook on the other hand seems to do something different with every browser.
I don't like the fact that all webites (including hotmail) keep making their pages more and more complex. It's the web 2.0 syndrome, where they feel compelled to replace every default behavior with script that does something slightly different. Suddenly there are drop downs and mouseovers you can't select text you are typing...and god only knows what will happen if you hit the back button. It's not just hotmail that is doing this, it's almost every damn site you visit these days.
But when I check my mail I see lots of hotmail addresses in received mail.
The lovely Ivana runs a mailing list for a group of (shall we say 'middle aged') women. More than half of the addresses she sends to are hotmail.
many users started with hotmail when the alternatives were fiddley to set up and involved incoming mail servers, SMTP, authentication and other such phrases that just scared them off.
Hotmail was simple. Open a web browser and go to hotmail and get an account.
They are too scared to change. They know that they only have to open their browser and there's google for finding things* and a click away is hotmail.
*I'm still amazed by the number of people who open a browser window at google and then type in the web-address of the site they want to go to in the google search box. They are too scared even to type directly into the address bar of the browser. - in fact I've seen some folks open the google page and then type in Hotmail.
It's Ok for the geeks on here to criticise the woman in the article - but she is typical of many real-world people.
Logged into my hotmail for the first time for about 5 years using Chrome, and everything worked fine, except all my emails had gone. I was quite relieved, actually, that I wouldn't have to wade though five years' worth of spam from African dictators and Eastern European lovelies. Now, how do ou close your hotmail account??
M$ used to try and force you to pay for the upgrade to hotmail by limiting your inbox to 10 meg or something like that. Funny how that crap disappeared after gmail came on the scene. I swear at one point it looked like M$ was going to drop hotmail entirely as once they kill off their competitors they lose interest in a market.
we've globally blocked *hotmail for quite awhile now and our previously spammed to death customers thank us for it.
whatever amount of mailboxes hotmail claims to have probably 2/3 of it are simply spammer dumps. we see thousands of rejected hotmail emails every week to a handful of spamtraps we have setup.
what I can't understand is why all the web browsers don't work with their new interface. they are using standardized web code that can easily be validated by a third party (sarcasm).
I guess we're all going to be forced to use google chrome now to browse the interwebz since it's became trendy to see the internet how developers deem fit rather than the method we've enjoyed for years that's permitted us to get this far without pulling our hair out.
I had a strange problem with Hotmail when they rolled out the new version. In Firefox 3.6, immediately after logging in the browser tried to redirect me to atdmt.com (or a subdomain of it).
I Googled this and found it's to do with a tracking cookie and there are some settings you can make in your hosts file to block it. What's strange though is that when you use IE 7 or IE 8 you don't get that problem. It has since started to all work properly in Firefox again, so I've no idea what happened with it - was it a deliberate attempt to switch people to IE? Confusing if they're recommeding Chrome.
MS need to get Steve Balmer to appear in a black turtleneck and jeans at a hastily organized press conference and state defiantly there is NOTHING wrong with hotmail, and that it is all the fault of the users for holding their mouses wrong.
Steve Jobs because he would never let a buggy product like this hit the market.
*shrug* didn't even notice any hiccups no matter what browser I use.
Over the past 13 odd years or so I have had to rely on my Hotmail acct for work purposes on the odd occasion and yes I would most defintely not build a business that relys on it but in fairness to M$ I have never had anything more than minor issues with Hotmail.
As folks say you get what you paid for and well I am a fairly happy customer given that fact..
Beer to anyone who even if they had an issue didn't start whinging to M$ about a freee product; lets see those ppl setup a web based email system for millions of ppl globally and see how they do.
Never even got as far as entering a password, even with a screen.
Saw a mid.live.com redirect. Got a different login page with subtle difference to
that provided from live.com login. Akamai "man-in-the-middle" Verisign SSL certificate
WITH NO MICROSOFT ID on the browser bar.
I strongly recommend that anyone entering their details CHECK CAREFULLY where
their login details ACTUALLY Went! Assuming you have history etc.
Massive changes to code, released too quickly before CAREFULL checking are fertile ground for Phishing attacks.
Not reported. To hell with them. They deserve to lose a significant proportion of
their user base.
Comments from a web pen./ security analyst willing to give M$ their time for free?
Is there, was there, will there ever be, a reason to use Hotmail?
Sounding like something that can't make up its mind whether it is marketing itself to teenagers or providing a porn service is not a great way to get taken seriously.
Even Yahoo! has it beat, hands down, exclamation marks up...
A friend of mine has the problem of everything freezing and memory munching when she tries to go to her inbox using her hotmail account.
When I do it on my hotmail account on the same machine everything is fine !
So same browser, same ISP just different accounts.
I found out on her account if you click the inbox using "open in new tag" the problem vanishes.
HTH, because otherwise it's a reboot job usually.
I have problems with messenger now. It won't load in Opera 10.53 and Firefox 3.6.8. That's on XPSP3 and Linux. IE6 works OK. Yeah, the company are upgrading very shortly so bye bye IE6!
I have had the Couldn't sign you out 'cos your browser is blocking cookies error for a while. I only use hotmail because I can chat with others on Messenger. Chat clients won't work at work so have to use browser version which probably won't work when we get WIn7 later this month.
Paris - she's got no bugs!
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