Hotmail Problems

Scott Hardie | November 15, 2001
Is anyone else out there currently having trouble with a Hotmail account? Sometimes when I download messages with Outlook Express, some information is lost. Most commonly it's the body of the message, but sometimes it's the subject, the timestamp, or even the sender that is missing. If I log onto my Hotmail account on the web, I can read the info just fine. I'm just wondering if anybody else knows anything about this new glitch and if there's any way to fix it.

Matthew Preston | November 23, 2001
Having worked for an ISP and coming across every problem known to man that is dealt with the Internet, I think I can help here.

Chalk this one up to the fact that you are using an email client. Email clients (such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger, etc. use a method of transferring data that is much more archaic than a web browser.

When you download a file through a web browser or ftp client, they have much more advanced methods of error correction. If a packet of information is corrupted or lost somewhere along the line, the data is retrieved by simply asking the remote host for the specific information again.

For Email clients though, it is more along the lines of : "I am going to send you the information once, if you don't get it, you can try again from the start." If even one packet of information is lost or corrupted, it will mess up the whole connection. This mostly happens when people try to download large attachments. Feel good that you are getting anything at all, users who don't use hotmail would get nothing at all.

=phew=

Scott Hardie | November 24, 2001
Thanks for the info on this. The problem went away just as mysteriously as it started, but now I know what the problem was.