One addition on Michael Loftis' article about MS's Hotmail service
(http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.60.html#subj11):
I also have a Hotmail account to handle the private mail and I noticed
today an interesting behaviour concerning the Junk Mail-folder:
Now, logging in this morning (Aug 20) I noticed a warning mail from
Hotmail Staff (Aug 18) that my account size is too large. Opening the
mail was impossible, because all I got was a warning that I was 5120K
over my quota. Someone's spam bot had gone to overdrive and sent over
600 spams to my account (all similar and from the same address, size
about 10K).
Emptying the Junk Mail folder (and blocking the spammers address) meant
that I could again use my account normally and also read the mail from
Hotmail Staff, which told me that if I didn't react before Aug 23,
Hotmail would start "deleting messages (usually older ones from all of
your folders) until your account is smaller than the 2-MB size limit".
Apparently, this is normal behaviour for MS Hotmail, as I managed to
find out in the service conditions. 5 days reaction time, before we
start emptying your account starting from the oldest. The risk?
If someone does not check his/her Hotmail for a week (eg. vacation,
illness), it is very easy to remove all his/her mail from all the
folders by simply sending in too much spam. Including the Junk
Mail-folder into the account size limit makes this kind of
"denial-of-mail" very easy, because mail in a Junk Mail folder isn't
deleted for 14 days from it's arrival.
Fortunately, I don't trust WWW-based email services enough to use them
for anything important but still: wiping out your email box is a
nuisance.
Kimmo Pyykkö, Development Manager, New Communications Services/
Technology Center tel. +358 2040 58328 [Kimmo via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 62]
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