Another post not on the topic I set out a little while ago, this time about email - specifically webmail. A family member asked me to backup their webmail account and it so happens to be a Hotmail account. Naively I figure that by now, Microsoft must have created a fairly nice webmail experience that will allow users to export their mail. A bit of research later and I get the first disappointment: no, no such option exists. Microsoft would love for you to use Hotmail, but reserves the right to extend the middle finger to anyone that might be interested in getting their own personal email out of Hotmail.

Fine, option #2: connect to Hotmail with an email client, say Thunderbird. Setup is easy, indeed it goes very fast, but what's this? POP3? But I want IMAP, as I don't want to bother with checking that messages are not deleted online and I also want to download everything in the various folders. Some more research and it's revealed that while M\$ has no problem bleeding money out of their crap search engine, they can't be bothered to provide a proper interface to their webmail. How can these morons still be in business? How is it possible that they lure so many people into using their crap?

Grudgingly, we move on to option #3: Microsofts own Windows Live Mail. As the company is known for it's loser-mentality (keep everything proprietary and make sure your own developers know "the secret APIs") one might expect that this program (package, in fact: another loser-mentality streak - you need to download an entire package to get to their mail program, even though you have no use for the other crap) would work. However, that's not the case: it only downloads whatever's in the inbox. Microsoft does not believe in backup, apparently.

Conclusion: the only thing I actually managed to do to backup the emails was to print them to PDF. Yes, that's how horribly bad Microsofts email service is. It really, truly boggles my mind why anyone would ever trust anything to do with email from this company (so please dump your POS exchange servers - there are better alternatives anyway and they're free).

Well, not entirely true: I also managed to get so angry that I wrote to Microsoft that they could "fuck off and die". That's how bad my user experience was.