What's up with Hotmail???

[DaHazeMan]

Ok...I've had a hotmail account for years - the anonymity thing. When I got IE5.5, and more recently IE6, I started using OE for my hotmail. I use Eudora for my other email now, but not for hotmail - won't work.

I wanted to go onto the hotmail site to change some preferences, but whenever the main hotmail page gets to about 98% loaded (after AT LEAST 5 minutes - on cable nonetheless) it tries to make a direct connection with my computer. Fortunately, my firewall won't let them do it. Mind you, the alerts are really annoying!

What I want to know is WHY M$ needs to access my computer when I'm simply opening their hotmail LOGIN page. I knew they made some changes to the hotmail site, but ADDING A HACKING UTILITY TO THE WEB PAGE isn't a good change in my eyes.

Time to delete the account altogether (from another computer of course) and apologize to anyone important I might have given that address to.

So much for the little respect I had left for those _______ (fill in the blanks) !!

[Steve R Jones]

Its probably just trying to look at your cookies?!?

[club_med]

This never happened before ? (that it tried accessing your comp ?)

[DaHazeMan]

Well, if it's trying to look at my cookies it won't succeed. With IE6 I have all 3rd party cookies automatically declined and all others need my authorization to get put on my machine. I don't think I've ever let Microsoft put anything on my machine (to my knowledge anyway), so it wouldn't find anything anyway.

Besides, if they want to check for a cookie with a utility that sets off my firewall, then they should at least give me some kind of warning that it's going to happen and on what port it's going to happen on so I can set up my firewall to overlook it. I've never had a web site set off my firewall because of cookie-reading before...what's so different about this site?

I've sworn by Microsoft products before - I don't like Word Perfect, Netscape, anything from AOL, Dream Weaver, Mac's, ...the list goes on. But I'm almost to the point, now, of swearing at them instead!

[linux_guru]

I love logging into Hotmail from Linux with Opera ........... confuses the **** out of it.

[club_med]

How far do you get linux_guru ?

[linux_guru]

All the way !

I get to login O.K. It's just that I have better security and have more control of what cookies I allow onto my computer.