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But that begs the question … .why the hell would I want an MSN Hotmail account?

At least they’re not checked by default :)

Good grief, that is truly awful.

I’m glad I ditched my Hotmail account years ago.

I don’t think they have enough choices. Isn’t more always better?

I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of stats they get from this page. Probably what, a .0000001% join rate.

Your centering is messing up the rest of your blog. At least in IE6 it is.

I find it interesting that they give you collapse icons for each section. That smells of an internal argument that turned into a useless compromise. As if anyone who sees this screen would take the time to collapse the sections they don’t care about.

Diego, your browser is messing up the rest of the web. At least in the world wide web it is. _

Are people still joining Hotmail? Friends don’t let friends do Hotmail.

What I find funny is that you are still signing up through a MSN branded site. Shouldn’t it surely, by now be Windows Live (Hot)Mail branding, especially for new users who don’t want to be confused with two branding strategies in one product.

Who wouldn’t want all that email coming to them? I get so disappointed when I can actually find what I’m looking for!

hahaha I tried to find the POP3 settings and gave up after a while …

Yeah. The branding should be Hotmail err… MSN err… Windows Live… nevermind I give up.

78 Glorious areas to read and decisions to make.

This page brought to you by Sesame Street, Count Von Count, and the number 78.

Truly horrible from just about any perspective. Especially for us techies and web gurus who don’t want anything in our inbox, but is HotMail really targeting or for us? I’m asking the question. I don’t really know. My thought would be that hotmail is for the general consumer and the general consumer might really be interested in some – if not a lot – of that crap.

My wife fits in that boat somewhat and truth be told I would much rather her get it in a hotmail account than in her mailbox on my server.

and the layout of the columns is, as we say in sweden, like porridge, all messed up

I stopped using Hotmail and messenger when it all got confused with Passport.

Holy Crap. How annoying.

Makes me love my Gmail RSS Web Clips even more. Come to think of it…I don’t really look at those much anymore either.

Wow – are Microsoft that desperate for money?

IIRC , the offers used to be checked by default. Luckily back then Hotmail wasn’t quite so polygamous.

I still have a Hotmail account. I’m surprised it hasn’t become inactive since I don’t ever log into it!

I think Microsoft/MSN has realized they won’t be getting any new savvy users, so they’re just trying to leach onto as many of the unversed as they can. I’m sure they make a few cents for every subscription they get.

That reminds me, I once had a Hotmail account. I wonder if I can still login…

Hotmail is the worst! They don’t even save your sent emails, you have to check that off everytime you compose an email.

I’ve watched people sign up to things like HotMail, and it’s surprising how the great unwashed tend to actually like stuff like this (see GoDaddy’s signup for an even worse demonstration). They’ll subscribe to these various letters because they sound ‘fun’, etc.

I’ve tried migrating a few people from Hotmail to Gmail, but it’s never worked out. People seem to like crap.

I think I got carpal tunnel just from scrolling through that image. Thanks for enduring the horror so that we don’t have to.

That has got to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen!

The “End” key is a beautiful thing.

Question: were those all expanded by default? They appear to be categorised by theme, and so if they were all hidden to begin with that might prompt a new signup to investigate particular categories that interested them.

Okay, I just ran through the process myself out of curiosity and indeed those are expanded by default. Pretty ridiculous.

What I will say though is that the signup process is relatively painless up to that point. Unlike Yahoo, you can check the availability of your preferred address on the page without the whole page reloading (or any popups). They also have a neat feature on the page where you’re choosing your address, entering a password etc. where focusing the particular group of form controls you’re entering into highlights the group and a contextual help message appears telling you what each stage is for.

Looks like an endless roll of toilet paper.

This page no longer exists in Windows Live Hotmail. When MSN signup goes away you won’t see this any more.

I wish I had an endless roll of toilet paper. :)

I still have a hotmail account. I move around a lot and got it when the choices were Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. I keep it because of the hassle of trying to contact people and convince them to change their address books. It’s nice to have the same personal E-mail address for years.

However, the new Windows Live Mail crashes Firefox pretty much whenever I try to access my mail with it, so I use Opera, and they’ve just changed the text so it’s hard to read in Opera.

Oh, and my spam has tripled in the past week.

End rant.

Have you ever bought a domain with godaddy? It may be the most hostile user experience out there. They have about 4 pages of dialogs like this hotmail one.

GoDaddy is insane to buy a domain through. So many hurdles, gauntlets, etc. DirectNic is so much cleaner and easier.

when i was testing a POP email client a few years ago, we used to use this very signup page to generate spam test data. Lots of multipart mime bodies that are good for testing our parsers ;)

Back in the day, I used to sign-up for throwaway Hotmail accounts to do, um… anonymous, um… activities. I had to go through that every time.

So I switched to Yahoo.

You Hotmail account doesn’t get deactivated if you use it regulary for signing into MSN Messenger. However, I think all the emails you might have in inbox, etc will get delete after a period of inactivity … it’s a great way of purging the account :-)

iujoiuoiuo

as far as know, it’s always been like this..

@Richard A. Muscat: you what? Purging the account? The email you receive must not be worth keeping then. In my case, if there was the risk of it all disappearing my life and may well fall apart as a result. Point I’m trying to make: Hotmail sucks ass.

This post made me laugh by the way… you guys are great :D

Oops… *...all disappearing my life and job may well…

Ah hotmail. At one time I thought it was the best thing ever. Last year I abandoned it due to spam. I’ve been using gmail ever since and have had no spam issues. Gmail catches them all.

And I love the comment about having all the options checked on the login. That would be typical Microsoft fashion, wouldn’t it?

Yet another GMail user here…I’ve managed to virally get everyone I know except one of my brothers onto GMail, and they won’t go back.

@Richard: I’m not sure I’d regard that as a feature. Quite a few times, I have a fuzzy idea I’ve an email from someone, somewhere, at least with GMail I’m reasonably confident they’re not going to go and whack all my mails on a whim.

I’m sure Microsoft defenders will say, well, Hotmail is the biggest mail provider on the web, it costs money to run all those servers and provide that storage, etc etc, GMail doesn’t have a fraction of the number of users Microsoft does. Difference is, Google will keep on expanding capacity as more users come on-stream, Microsoft tries to solve capacity issues by deleting content unless you fork out some cash.

Which is all the entire MSN group is. One big user milking machine, be it via paying to get the same (with worse UI) you can get elsewhere for free, or blasting a firehose of advertising paid for by dodgy partners at users, selling every inch of collectible personal and site usage data back to those partners.

Google simple – Hotmail yikes!