Slow hotmail

Pawwed Rig

Does anyone know what processes hotmail uses that are different to other online e-mail providers. My hotmail account is slow slow slow

wolfric

I'm not too sure i understand your question but i'll try give you a good answer. I'm going to assume you're talking about access the site and not just that emails that are being sent to you take a while to get to your inbox (correct me if i'm wrong here).

Are you using http://hotmail.com (or using your browser in other words). If you spend a little time you can use a proper mail client such as thunderbird or outlook .

These will download the mail directly from the server to your computer and will save the emails on your computer. These will stay there and can be access when you're offline making reading them rather speedy. However you wouldn't do this for public computers (like internet cafe or work computer).

Generally the web browser way in (http://hotmail.com) is slow for 3 reasons:
One: Your internet access is slow or you have lots of activity clogging up the network in whatever way.

Two: Their site is coded badly and takes longer to interact with their backend servers or with you. This "process" as you might have been refering to, is coded by them personally and wouldn't be public open source or available to the public so we generally can't comment on the inner workings and benchmark/review like we could on other systems.

Three: Their servers are under very heavy load (be it the server serving you or the mail server that it's connect to in the background). This can be just high usage or a denial of service attack (which i have to say hotmail has a habit of being on the but end of attacks more often than other providers)

The proper email client as i recommended above connects to the backend mail server. When someone sends you a mail and you receive it, it happens like this

mail -> (hotmail mail servers)

then when you go to hotmail.com,

you <-> hotmail.com <-> mail servers.

Now they might use some sort of caching system that you don't notice this that much but generally if you click an email going in this way, hotmail has to go fetch that email from the mail server and get back to you. If you're using a proper mail client (such as thunderbird or outlook mentioned above). It grabs ALL your mail and stores it on your computer. When you want it, it accesses it from the hard drive which is a LOT faster.

Does this help/answer your question?

Naikon

Pawwed Rig wrote: »

Does anyone know what processes hotmail uses that are different to other online e-mail providers. My hotmail account is slow slow slow

Have you tried other mail service providers? I use Gmail and it's pretty stable. You could totally avoid the web interface by using a very, very barebones email client such as Alpine or Evolution(not as light).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_%28e-mail_client%29
http://www.dipconsultants.com/evolution/

Pawwed Rig

Hey Guys. Thanks for taking the time to respond. I was accessing hotmail through the web and yeah I can set up a g-mail account etc etc but have had this account for years and don't want to have to go to every site I am registered on to change.

Have downloaded thunderbird and will try that for a while and see how it goes.

Looked through lots of online forums. Just type 'slow hotmail' into google and you will see how many people have the same issues. It is something on my computer as it has been happening consistantly for about 6 weeks or so.

Thanks again for the responses. Thunderbird was easier to install than I thought:o)

wolfric

To address the hotmail->gmail point: You can have gmail act rather like thunderbird online and it will get all your email and download it to it's server. You can add a label such as youremail@hotmail.com which will appear beside it. That way you can still use your hotmail address and use gmail to check it. You can

There are two ways to do this. Get gmail to log into hotmail and get it from there. Set it up in hotmail to automatically forward all mail to another address (which is your gmail address)

Generally getting hotmail to forward your mail will let you receive it faster as gmail will only check hotmail for new mail periodically so as not to completely spam hotmail with (is there any mail? no, is there any mail? no) etc