Microsoft’s Hotmail Sucks!
Hehe. Now that I’ve gotten your attention, what’s the story with Hotmail’s support for UTF-8?? Try sending a HTML mail in the UTF-8 encoding, accented characters will come out like gobbledegook.
This is 2005, not 1997, UTF-8 is seriously becoming (sorry, has become) the lingua franca of the Internet, and I really did not expect Hotmail not to have full support for it.
So I have a bug in work, “Incorrect handling of accented characters when viewed with Hotmail”, and I’m thinking “what now?”. I have a UTF-8 mail, do I just always transcode to ISO-8859-1 (sorry, Windows-1252)? What does that do to Chinese people, or 日本人? Nothing good, is the answer.
P.S. If this actually gets read by people at Microsoft, I am seriously impressed! Maybe we should call it “sidetalking”. Oh wait, that one was taken already 
June 21st, 2005 at 8:23 pm
I noticed something similar happening on my movable type - do you have any ideas about getting UTF-8 support in MT?
June 21st, 2005 at 10:11 pm
I am running into the same problem with Hotmail. I am using CDO.Message to send email with UTF-8 encoding and they get slammed in Hotmail. This seems so silly. Am I not encoding the email correctly or is Hotmail causing the problem?
September 19th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
It’s 2006 and still they didn’t fix this issue ,When will this ever be fixed!
September 22nd, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Well, I hope the Hotmail beta will fix this, but I didn’t get access to the beta, to verify.
March 9th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
It’s now 2007 and they have still not fixed it…
July 23rd, 2007 at 1:26 am
I think many miss the point of all the wasted clicking to navigate in the first place. Hotmail does suck and thats why I let my three accounts die two years ago. Everyone elses is better.
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:21 pm
YES IT DOES. And they won’t fuckng let you out. They actually have the balls to suggest you set up auto fowarding from other providers to them, but they don’t provide any auto forwarding because they can’t make a shitty half penny on you doing that. Fuck them, share their overpriced software with everyone who’ll take it and if you see them at a job fair or pimping their relabled internet access(they actually have the balls to re sell comcast cable and others, you can go to radio shack and buy whatever broadband is available in your area from MSN), punch them in the face or break their signs.