Hotmail does it again

Microsoft Hotmail continues its campaign to prove, beyond doubt, the old adage that says you only get what you pay for. This time the service, already famous for its security problems, spam floods and design flaws, is deleting emails over 30 days old from users' sent folder. Microsoft warned users in mid-June it planned to do this, and a product manager told News.com last week: "if it's 30 days or older, it's probably safe to go ahead and delete that." Trouble is, if online services start making these decisions for you, suspicion of online services - including Microsoft's much-hyped .Net initiative - will only grow. You might save on hard disk and bandwidth costs now, but I'll bet buying that confidence back is going to cost far more in the future. For the record, only 300,000 of Hotmail's 110 million users have upgraded to the $19.95 paid-for service.