Live Mail Fail (still)

Okay…a few more weeks have passed, and surely my Live Mail Woes issues that I blogged about in June are resolved, right?  WRONG!  Oh I keep hoping…today’s the day…today’s the day that I’m going to click on "Download" and my folders will sync up and all will be right in the world.

So I click onward and nothing happens.  Perhaps I didn’t click hard enough – CLICK – maybe with my left hand, yeah, that’s the ticket – CLICK – arrrggggh!  No joy.  Maybe it’s a problem with Vista x64 – I’ll install Live Mail on Vista 32-bit edition – that’ll solve the problem – CLICK (on Vista 32) – nothing…  Maybe Live Mail doesn’t like Vista, I’ll install Live Mail on XP Pro – good ol’ XP Pro – never lets me down – okey dokey, XP install’s done, Live Mail’s installed and – CLICK – STILL nothing! 

Excuse me if I’m a tad dubious about signing up for the Microsoft Online Services new offerings of Exchange Hosted Services.

Granted, the Live Mail offering is "free" – as in it isn’t costing me up-front money to have the mail account – (I’m guessing the payback is the important demographic and contextual info they’re gathering from my emailings and the like).   That said, I have an expectation of some semblance of service and support for the account.  Simple expectations along the lines of if I inform Microsoft of a problem with their service, then perhaps they’ll actually fix said problem and maybe even restore my accounts folder integrity within say…..two months????  Is that too much to ask? 

As it is now, if somebody were to ask about my opinion of the Live Edu mail hosting offerings from Microsoft I’d have to say "No Thank You" in light of what I’m seeing now.  And if businesses were to ask about the Exchange Hosting Services?  Same thing…I can only recommend what I’ve had good success with, and so far, my Live Mail hosting story is nothing to email home about…oh yeah, I couldn’t if I wanted to ’cause my folders won’t download!

Maybe they’d better slap a "Beta" tag on their header like GMail does.  That way they’d at least have the excuse that "it’s still in beta – whataya expect?".

Doug White