With the recent announcements on the free e-mail frontier with Google and Spymac offering 1 GB of storage for free, Lycos putting up a paid 1 GB alternative, and Yahoo! planning to upgrade all its customers to 100 MB box free of charge, MSN Hotmail reportedly deleted some users’ files and blamed it on system problems. News.com.com.com does not say how many customers were impacted, but it brings a legitimate question on how accountable should the free e-mail systems be when dealing with customers’ data. Yes, they are free and you get what you pay for, but with ad viewing and all the good stuff forced upon free e-mail users, shouldn’t there be at least some back-up guarantee or at least Web-based utility to conveniently archive all of the existing Web mail on your local drive?
