So, how is Hotmail doing with its spam problems ? This very issue has come up innews.admin.net-abuse.email recently, so let's take a look and see.

This week we accepted exactly one email from Hotmail, which may or maynot have been spam.

Also this week, we refused 84 messages from Hotmail that came fromnon-Hotmail email addresses, mostly msn.com but including domains like'ukwiningnotice.com', 'usm2005lot.

First question: why bother, apart from idle curiosity? For a start,I'm interested in knowing how worthwhile it is to do things that helpa specific search engine.

Search engines care a lot about their popularity, with the result thatyou can't really trust anything they say about it. I'm not sure youcan trust any other source of information, and to get solid data youprobably have to pay money for it.

Besides, I don't care about global search engine popularity

The other thing we had to do the other day was name the new server we were bringing up, which is often harder thanit looks.

Good names machine are important because they let you tell thingsapart. This means that good names have to be different from eachother, so you can avoid fun games like 'was it ws3-05 or ws5-03 thathad the problem?'

People usually resort to generic names like 'ws5-03' for two reasons:they

I just gave someone at work this advice today, so I might as wellrepeat it here. We were bringing up a new machine, a nice dualprocessor server with a hardware RAID-1, and I suggested to him thatbefore he even thought about putting it into production he take theopportunity to yank one of the drives and see what happened.

There are occasions where you would do this to a machine inproduction, but not very many. New hardware (or idle hardware) isabout your only chance