Choking off spam gets desperate enough, but Microsoft is going to put a real choke on it, they think: they're limiting MSN Hotmail users to one hundred outbound e-mails a day, saying they think this is one certain way to bring the spam down to a dull roar.
They say almost all the Hotmail users they've asked don't mind the new limits if it means getting the junk out of the e-mail. "The higher the limit is, the more likely that the service can be used for spam," said MSN Hotmail lead product manager Lisa Gurry to ZDNet.com, "so we found that 99 percent of Hotmail users would find this new limit perfectly acceptable."
MSN Hotmail introduced the new limits last week. Hotmail users began getting popup windows advising them they'd exceeded their outgoing message limits for 24-hour periods, such as the user who got one when trying to send political mail to a list of his usual contacts.
"The only restrictions that Hotmail had in the past was to limit to 50 the number of contacts that could be mailed at once. Therefore I always split my list in half and sent the same message twice," one user told ZDNet. "To circumvent that I now have to painstakingly paste together multiple messages...or wait for another day."
