Okay, so, like, remember when LJ made it so that you could delete your first email?

[conuly]

Because of people breaking into Hotmail accounts to generally cause trouble? And everybody said "Hotmail? WTF? Who still uses Hotmail?" Remember that? It was funny because the day they posted this I had that same reaction to passing a billboard by my local supermarket about a local business with the listed email not only being a Hotmail email but also having numbers and underscores, which, really, just looks so unprofessional.

Yeah. Apparently Al Qaida uses Hotmail. Or they did as recently as 2001, anyway. Whoda thunkit?

Comments

[marveen.livejournal.com]

Um, I use Hotmail.

I actually see this as a symptom of What's Wrong With Our Society, Economically Speaking. I have the same email I had in 1998 and the same cellphone that I started out with four years ago. The company that I bought the phone from "no longer supports" that model, which makes me angry. It still works, why should I buy another? Similarly with the email--I change passwords regularly (as we all should), and I neither have problems with security nor do my old friends have trouble finding my latest email address.

[conuly]

Planned obsolescence is not sustainable, no, but there's a difference between Hotmail and your phone in that your phone uses natural resources and your email provider... well, it's not like it causes waste to ditch one email and get another.

As far as passwords go, Hotmail has security flaws which make accounts there easy to crack by people who know what they're doing, even if you're very conscientious about your password, though I think the big problem with Hotmail and LJ was that many people had let their Hotmail accounts lapse and other people were opening new accounts with those same usernames, which allowed them to get people's passwords if they were linked to that account.

And the difference between you and Al Qaida, of course, is that you're presumably not using your email to transmit sensitive information that could get you imprisoned, upon which the lives of thousands hangs.

[lizziey.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I haven't changed my email address since I was 15, so I am going on 10 years with the same yahoo. No reason to change it as long as I change my passwords frequently enough. :-p