Why you should stop using Hotmail
This weekend we have been receiving on average one piece of spam from Hotmail accounts around every couple of seconds. Most of these are of the form
from=<3UV2QZ@hotmail.com>
from=<6JGLNP@hotmail.com>
and appear to come from hotmail accounts setup automatically by spambots which got thru the Hotmail captcha filters, and are bombarding the world with spam. While we stop them all one way or another, the processing load is extremely heavy, and we are very, very tempted just to ban email from Hotmail altogether. That would be the best solution.
Unfortunately we still have people who see themselves as business users, but use Hotmail accounts for their email. That's unfortunate, and also very unwise.
Here's a good article from someone else as to why you should stop using Hotmail.
http://turcanu.net/blog/2008/06/10/why-you-should-quit-using-hotmail-and-advice-others-to-do-the-same/
Of course the reasoning in the above article points to the cavalier attitude Hotmail shows when dealing with incoming mail, rather than their failures with regards to outgoing email, but it supports the case that hotmail is now a blight on the internet.
According to one article,
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080415-gone-in-60-seconds-spambot-cracks-livehotmail-captcha.html
it now takes a spam bot less than six seconds to hack the Hotmail captcha and create a new account. That gives the capacity to setup 1440 new hotmail accounts in one day, each of them instantly a new spam vector
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