Microsoft says it recovered 100% of email and folders for the accounts affected. Unfortunately, for those who didn’t sign into their accounts between the time of the incident and the time the account was restored, any messages sent to their accounts during that time would have bounced. 

Microsoft has apologized for the incident, but it can’t have been very good for the service’s reputation with users, particularly considering there plenty of other options out there. Hotmail has hundreds of millions of users and competitors like Yahoo and Google will be happy to take as many of them as possible. 

The whole thing makes you stop and consider how much users are relying on third-parties for essential communication. Who’s to say people didn’t miss extremely important messages during that period? 

Microsoft’s Mike Schackwitz details exactly what happened on the company’s Inside Windows Live Blog:

In Hotmail, one way we monitor the health of the email service is through automated tests. We set up a number of accounts with different configurations, and then use automated tests to log into these accounts, simulate normal user activity and behavior, and report when errors are found. We use scripts to create and delete these test accounts in bulk. The way we delete a test account is to remove its record from a group of directory servers that route users and incoming mail to the correct mailbox. 

On December 30th, we had an error in a script that inadvertently removed the directory records of a small number of real user accounts along with a set of test accounts. Please note that the email messages and folders of impacted users were not deleted; only their inbox location in the directory servers was removed.  Therefore when they logged in, a new mailbox was automatically created for them on a new storage server that didn’t contain their old messages and folders. This is why the accounts received the “Welcome to Hotmail” message. 

Read the post for further explanation. 

It’s not like Microsoft is the first provider to experience downtime. Google has always bragged about its Gmail uptime (and has a dashboard where users can monitor it), but it’s gone down on occasion too. Facebook is trying to redefine email and electronic communication with its social inbox, but Facebook recently went down for a lot of users itself. Twitter is no replacement for email, but a lot of people communicate with it frequently, and that fail whale appears fairly frequently. 

Microsoft says it’s updating its infrastructure, and changing its alert process, as well as its feedback process to take preventative action against future incidents. Unfortunately, and this goes for any company, it’s usually the issues you don’t think to prevent that end up costing people.

The Birthday and 400 Million Users

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed it in a blog post last night. "Today we’re celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we’ve made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected."

"Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better." he added. "We hoped Facebook would improve people’s lives in important ways. So it’s rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about."

Facebook hosted a celebration and announced some releases at the Facebook headquarters last night. This was followed by a hackathon where Facebook staff stayed up all night coding and building new ideas for products.

Do you like the direction Facebook’s gone in for the past six years? Let us know.

Design Changes

Facebook announced some new changes to the design of its homepage. Users can find their newest notifications, requests, and messages in the top menu. When a user receives a notification, they will see a red bubble appear in the left-hand corner by the search bar. When the icon is clicked, a drop-down menu appears with the most recent notifications. The Home/Profile links are in the top-right corner with the Account menu, which includes privacy settings and the log out link.

The menu on the left-hand side of the screen has been completely reworked. "The left menu has been organized to make it easier for you to communicate with and discover content from your friends. You can now access your messages and other core features all in one place, to the left of your News Feed," says Facebook’s Jing Chen. "With the Photos dashboard you can browse recent photos of your friends, and the Events dashboard lists your upcoming events along with events your friends are attending. The Friends dashboard will help you find friends, see which of your friends have recently updated their profiles and filter your News Feed by Friend Lists you may have already created."

Chat has also been made more prominent with a list of online friends displayed on the left. The new apps and games dashboards, which have been discussed lately, can be accessed from the menu as well. The dashboards feature personalized updates from the apps, and they have launched with new privacy settings.

The changes are still rolling out, so it’s possible that you do not have them yet, but you will soon enough.

What do you think about Facebook’s design changes? Good Move or bad? Tell us what you think.

The Webmail Product

Michael Arrington is reporting that a "source with knowledge of the product" says Facebook is launching a webmail product. If MySpace can do it, surely Facebook can too. It’s being referred to right now as "Project Titan", although the name will likely change.

Facebook’s messages as they stand right now, lend to email notifications. When you check your email, you find that someone has sent you a message on Facebook. If Facebook gets you using its own email service, it’s cutting out the middle man, and that means…you guessed it – more time spent on Facebook.

Would you use Facebook for email if they offered a full webmail product? Tell us why or why not.

Facebook As the Web’s Top News Source?

I’ve already written on this topic this week, but basically, the more time people spend on Facebook, the more convenient they may find it to simply get their news feeds there. If Facebook enters the email game, that’s only going to get people using Facebook that much more, and even open up yet another way for them to get their news on Facebook, through email newsletters and news alerts.

Do you see people increasingly getting their news on Facebook? Share your thoughts.

Update: Microsoft has announced some changes to its partnership with Facebook. Facebook will now be taking over its own display advertising, and will get a more feature-rich version of Bing search for its web search.

Related Articles:

> Respond to Facebook Comments From Your Email

> Pingdom Names Facebook "Most Engaging Social Network"

> Content Can Now Go Viral More Easily with Facebook

"The bad guys have more than just access to users’ email accounts," says the spokesperson. "They have access to a host of other online services the victims use."

Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst says, "A user’s unique email address is often used to authenticate a number of web sites, including social networking sites and Instant Messaging on a public Instant Messaging (IM) network. If your email address has been compromised, not only should you change the password there, you should also change it on any other site that uses that email address as a log in ID."

If a cybercriminal had the email account information and wanted to take over a related social networking account, all they would have to do is try the password reminder links from the login pages. Then they could use the victim’s email to spam, but they could also gain access to other personal information, not to mention use your account to spam social networks as well.

MessageLabs says it has tracked a number of phishing attacks using Instant Messaging, where bad guys would collect real IM user account info and passwords, only to use them to send spam to everyone on the person’s buddy list. This is another possible result. "An invitation to view a funny video or embarrassing pictures by clicking on a link in an IM was the bait and the landing site would then ask the victim to log in with their IM user name and password," the spokesperson says. "For public IM networks, the user name is often the same as the web-based email account."

In other phishing-related news, the FBI has charged nearly 100 people in the United States and Egypt as part of Operation Phish Phry," one of the largest cyber fraud phishing investigations ever. WebProNews has more details on that here.

If that’s not enough, over at the Gmail blog, they’ve just mentioned “More Gmail Storage for All”

In my opinion, it’s been a brutally effective marketing campaign with the other free email marketing services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail upping their 20megabyte and 100megabyte quotas to try to match the (current) market leader.

Will you be able to exhaust it all?

Not likely, unless you’re like the user who “sends minute to minute photo updates of her kids in RAW format”.

More than a handful of Internet marketers I know run their business using primarily their Gmail accounts, but until the process of writing an email evolves beyond drafting a text message with attachments, you might have difficulty making full use of your email quota.

Google’s instant messenger service Google Talk provides text messaging which is then archived in your Gmail account. It’s a good alternative to the other instant messenger services and I’ve been using it more frequently for project collaborations.

Still, do email service quotas mean anything anymore?

If nothing else, it can be therapeutic to see the quota tick upwards when you’re taking a short break…

Comments

POP is the only protocol supported, this means Thunderbird can only download emails. To send emails use your ISP’s SMTP server, Thunderbird will set the “Return-Path” and “From” email headers using the web account email address, too the recipient the email will appear to have come from the web base account.”

Excellent!

It currently handles Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Lycos. I’d expect to see Gmail soon too.

Link: Mozilla Web-Mail project

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

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