This is part 1 in which I describe the various types of Hotmail Closure notices. In part 2 I explain how I acted to try to bring a help article to Hotmail’s help directory to say that “Hotmail is not closing, and they do not forward emails by chain mail”. Read that here.

I am not a Hotmail user. I used to be, but I don’t intend to return in the near future. Even the facelift due shortly doesn’t give it anything on Gmail in my opinion. However I know a lot of Hotmail users. And I therefore get a lot of messages from Hotmail.com. Sometimes the content of the messages suggests that Hotmail is running out of resources and will have to close in the near future. The messages go on to say that they need you to forward the message to 20 contacts or so to keep your account active. The messages come in various forms. Some are pretty convincing like: (View Large)

And others are purely embarassing:

Hey it is Andy and john the directors of MSN, sorry for the
interruption
but
msn is closing down. this is because too many inconsiderate
people are
taking up all the name (eg making up lots of different accounts
for
just one
person), we only have 578 names left. If you would like to close
your
account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. If you would like to keep
your
account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT
LIST. This
is no
joke, we will be shutting down the servers. Send it on, thanks.
WHO EVER DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSEAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE
CLOSED AND
YOU
WILL COST £10.00 A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR
CONTACT
LIST.
NOW YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS or REPLAY.
COPY THE
WHOLE EMAIL. GO BACK TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. AND PASTE
THANK
YOU FOR
YOUR ATTENTION

Some cite a BBC article from a few years ago at this address:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1189119.stm

All of them request for you to get forwarding the message along to save yourself your acocunt and/or money for your account. These messages are not new at all. And all of them are completely bogus. There is to be no closing of Hotmail in the near future, or even the distant future. And even if Hotmail did decide that it was going to start charging users (which I have to say is fairly unimaginable with the current competition) then they would contact everyone individually. Hotmail do not and will not send you important service changing information via forwards. I havent checked but I am pretty sure they would break the terms of the EULA if they didn’t.

I started to get a little sick of these messages. Especially since I don’t even use the service. For some reason people kept believing them and kept forwarding the message on. Not only that but as you see at BreakTheChain.org these messages are pretty dangerous. Everytime you forward the email the addresses contained within the email pile up. I have some messages in my inbox with hundreds of email addresses on from steps further up the chain. If I were a spammer then I would be a happy person. I wanted to send out a message to everyone who sent me a forward of this nature (and everyone they were sending it to) that clearly stated the above and linked to a article on the Hotmail help where this information is clearly shown. Only one problem. This information is not clearly shown on Hotmail’s help. It isn’t shown at all. I guess at this point I began to sympathise a little with the “forwarders”. They had no one telling them that these things were completely false. Apart from intuition, how were they supposed to know?

On 4th March 2006 I wrote to Hotmail customer support. I know I am not a customer but it was the most suitable link I could find on their website. I requested a new article on the subject described above. Since then I have been exchanging emails with their support people. All of these emails will be published on this blog as soon as I have got to the bottom of the issue, that will be part 2. So far I have sent five messages and got 4 replies. The ball is in their court at this moment, but I expect a further reply very soon. I have written to four different representatives (always someone else replies) and as of 20.36 GMT on Tuesday 21st March there is no help article up.