Bad Hotmail! No cookie!

[pne]

Urk, can't get into Hotmail with Opera 6.04.

First it claimed that I had disabled cookies, which isn't true. Then I cleared my cache and restarted the browser—still no dice: it still claimed I have disabled cookies.

I deleted all my cookie reject lists and tried again. At least I don't get an error message any more; instead, I get redirected to the login page.

A colleague said I should use Opera 7, which worked when he had that problem a while ago, or just wait a few hours. Or to use MSIE.

But I'm not sure whether it's worth the trouble. I don't want to use MSIE because I try to use it as little as possible in the first place, and if I use it because it's the only thing that works on Hotmail, then Microsoft Will Have Won.

And I use my Hotmail accounts mostly only rarely (the rest of the time they just collect spam). I have a couple which I intended to use for random spoofings, a couple were "tagged accounts", and one main account. I also used that when I wanted webmail, for some reason.

My colleague suggested I use GMX, which also has webmail, but I'm not sure. Especially since that side is also overladen with ads and I don't particularly like its interface, and since my accounts there are forwarders, so I'd have to turn off the forwarding every time.

On the other hand, I also have an account with Fastmail.FM, with which I'm pretty pleased. It gives me ad-free, lightweight HTML pages and seems pretty responsive. So maybe I'll use that for the times when I need webmail (I already started using it to keep track of my LiveJournal comment emails while I was away on a training course) and just ditch my Hotmail accounts entirely (or rather, let them lapse).

Still, it's a bit of a pity, since a couple of those accounts are very old—I think even from before the acquisition by Microsoft; certainly from the time when it was still possible to obtain a decent name-based nick without a bunch of numbers in it for disambiguation. *sigh*

Comments

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

If you must use Opera, use it, but don't consider MSIE the only alternative! FireBird (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/release-notes.html) is miles better than IE and, IMO, better than Opera too.

[karen2205]

Yahoo webmail is fairly good, as is http://www.totalise.net (the really good thing about this one is that you get a mailbox of unlimited size). You can get POP access to Yahoo, and either POP or IMAP access to totalise.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ah! I've heard good things about Yahoo webmail, too (and apparently, Yahoo accounts draw less spam than Hotmail accounts, as well).

And Fastmail doesn't offer POP unless you pay a subscription (it's only IMAP for free members, which is not so useful when you're using dialup, since it pretty much requires a constant connection).

[pne.livejournal.com]

I'll have to try that out. Thanks!

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

No problem! Apart from being standards compliant, if you don't like anything about the browser, you can customise it - there are tons of themes (colours/buttons) and extensions (things like mouse gestures, adblock, text searching - i.e. highlight text, right-click, and choose to search various sites) available :)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Hm, it didn't play nice with our proxy just now... when I configured it to use the proxy, it apparently used the wrong username/password combination too many times in a row, which caused my account to be locked.

I managed to get it unlocked, but I don't think I'll try it again before tomorrow during the day, when I can call the hotline again if there are any problems. Hm.

(Didn't have those problems when I installed Mozilla 0.9.8, I think. Maybe I just wasn't paying sufficient attention with Firebird.)

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

How strange - I've never had any problems with proxies when using it - we have to use a proxy at Uni, and it's always worked fine.