Dave [in an e-mail message mass reply to 41 recipients]: "Kevin... you. are. INSANE!"
Me [in my own reply to all]: "Dave! You were sworn to secrecy! Now, I'm going to have to kill you!"
[Kevin clicks 'send']
Me: "What the holy hell is this? Since when do I have a message limit!?!? GAHHHHHH!!!"
This was when I decided it was finally time to ditch Hotmail.
I've been with Hotmail for years now. Ever since my usa.net e-mail provider decided to start charging their longtime users for e-mail access. I had been a faithful user, one who persisted despite his dislike of all things Microsoft. I didn't really care. I had too many subscriptions and personal records and filings attributed to my Hotmail account. It would be a royal pain in the ass to make the switch.
I've played with other free e-mail accounts. I have a Yahoo mail account (three, actually) and a Gmail account (just one here) and I played with several others as well. I was testing them to see if they were any good. All have their ups and their downs. But I never really had the chance to put them through the proverbial wringer because I was still so dedicated to using my Hotmail account.
No more.
This was the straw that broke the camel's back. How dare you impose a limit on my outgoing messages? I had not nearly come close to even filling my storage quota. I should be allowed to send messages till the third coming of Christ so long as I don't exceed my storage quota!
I have now moved fulltime to my Gmail account. If any of you need to contact me, I'm the same user, but at gmail [dot] com instead of hotmail [dot] com. My Hotmail account is still open in case of straggler messages, but I've, otherwise, been enveloped fully by the "G" as PostModern Sass refers to it (check out her fond (?) farewell to both Yahoo and Hotmail).
And thank you for making it so easy for me to export all the addresses in my address book so I could transfer them elsewhere, Hotmail! You are truly a gentleman and a scholar. (Do note the sarcasm oozing off that one - it took me two hours to transfer everything... manually).
So bite me, Microsoft. One last big ol' middle finger wagging in the air in the general direction of your Washington-based headquarters.
Now it's time to check out Open Office so I can truly be free!
Oh, and Dave, if you step outside and you see a giant middle finger coming your way... duck. It's not aimed at you. It's continuing on to Redmond.
