Is it time to block Hotmail?
It's one thing sitting in your skivvies wading through your inbox to find the 15 per cent of valid messages among the 85 per cent of email today that's just plain trash.
It's something else if you're being paid to do it. But that's the issue facing particularly smaller and medium sized businesses and non-profit organizations that don't have the money for sophisticated junk mail protection systems.
Yet again, we're seeing a flood of garbage from Hotmail, apparently due to another massive security breach that exposed accounts to the criminal spammers who've nearly succeeded in making email unusable.
Which raises the question: is it time to just block Hotmail from non-personal inboxes and be done with it?
We don't do business with consumers. Like many businesses, we're B2B - business to business. Our clients are businesses, and our suppliers are businesses. They all have business email addresses. Yet 99 per cent of the junk we get is from 'personal' accounts. About 1 per cent is from businesses who obviously aren't bright enough to get the message that most businesses hate spam and avoid doing business with spammers, or they're bogus to begin with and are just pretending to be businesses.
Whenever I see someone with a hotmail or gmail address on a business card, the first word that comes to mind is 'unprofessional'. If you're in business, get a business address, one that matches your business. Save the hotmail and gmail and yahoo mail for evenings and weekends. It's the same message that's sent when instead of embedding a company video on the company's web site, it's playing from YouTube. (On the other hand, it's usually worth a laugh when the ad that pops up over the video is for that company's main competitor...duh...)
So to see what kind of resonance this question has at Hotmail, I've left a message with one of the folks at Microsoft communications office in Toronto to see what they have to say about this.
-G
