Problems with Hotmail...

This post is unrelated to Japan, teaching, and my life here, but it's something that has been bothering me. I posted almost the same post as this as comments on Ejovi Nuwere's blog (www.ejovi.net) but I wanted to post it here, too.

Has anyone noticed that features have suddenly been disappearing from hotmail?

Like the ability to arrange your mail by something other than from newest mail to oldest. You used to be able to click on the: "From, Subject, Date, Size" links and arrange it in either of the 2 possible directions. (like oldest to newest versusu newest to oldest, or names A-Z versun Z-A) Now they aren't links. You can't change the order. It is just from most recent to least recent.

And "Junk mail" used to give you a little number by it on parenthesis with the number of new messages. (ie: Junk E-Mail(3) ) If there was no number then you didn't need to check. This is important because messages in there are automatically deleted after a short period. Well, the number isn't there anymore... and I've missed checking it because it didn't say that it had any junk mail. (and I had mail in there that I wanted to recieve.) The number isn't there for "Inbox" either anymore, but I always check that.

Not only this, but there used to be a drop down menu that allowed you to chose which page of your inbox you wanted to go to. Like, page 23 of 55. Since we now have over 1GB of space it is likely that we'll have many pages of e-mails. Well this feature is also gone. So now the only way to get to page 23 is to click the forward arrow 22 times. :(

That's all I've noticed thus far, but it's happened fairly recently because I've been using these features until very recently. With these features gone, hotmail has truly become unusable. My guess is that thay want to squeeze everyone out so they can make them switch to their new Live Mail Hotmail whatever... (Windows Live Hotmail, is it now?) But the fact that they would go this far to do it is really infuriating. Now I have no choice but to join live mail (which I've heard many bad things about) or find a new mail account which means a new e-mail and telling all of my contacts that I have a new mail address...

it really is unusable; the other day I needed very desperately to find info in an e-mail from about 3 months back. Well, I new who it was from, but I couldn't arrange my mail by name. And I could guess about the page it would be on, but I still had to click 20 or 30 times to get to that page. And when I e-mailed the site and submitted my info which got me a reply e-mail with my password or username or whatever, this e-mail ended up in my junk mail which I never checked because it had no notification that there were unread messages there. Only when I had requested the info again and was getting desperate did I venture into the Junk Mail folder and find the e-mail. (incidently, it was there along with the RSS feed e-mail for Ejovi's site, which never used to be junk...) Hotmail... grrr...