Windows Live Messenger

I think this might have been the first email address I have ever had, if not it was pretty close.  When I purchased my first computer, it was a refurbished laptop to go to college from Best Buy, I had the opportunity to sign up for internet through MSN for a year for free.  I am dating how old this email address is just by that offer! It must have been around the year 2000 or so — about a decade old.

I do not use the email for much.  It basically serves its purpose to sign up for promotions, or if I need it to purchase something it is my go-to email.  It is not something that I use for correspondence with friends or clients.  However, I do use it for chatting on Windows Live Messenger.  So on the relative importance of it, the email address is something I use, but not essential to my day-to-day operations.

When I tried to log-on yesterday afternoon to chat with some friends I was perplexed that I couldn’t sign in.  I was given some error code — 800488fb — which I had to scour the Internet to find the meaning.  Evidently, it means that your account has been blocked by the powers that be at Windows Live Messenger.  On one forum thread I found it appeared many people were blocked because spam was apparently coming from their account.

Now, I have seen some spammy messages on my MSN email address.  It was those messages, “sender unknown” messages that get bounced back to you.  I did not send those messages, and I figured someone was spoofing my email and sending them out pretending to be me.  I am sure it happens all the time, no big deal I thought.  Well evidently, Microsoft thought it was a big enough issue to block my account.  There is a way to get it unblocked.  One must be able to verify through receiving a text message on a cell phone, and the placing that code back into the computer that one is a real person.  After trying it several times over the course of ten minutes I gave up.

This frustrated me!  Microsoft took the lazy way out of this.  Instead of investigating and doing a little cyber forensics to track down who is really spamming out of these emails (if they checked the IP addresses they could easily verify it was not me, but tracking down the real culprit could be much, much more difficult) they just find an easy scape goat.

I ended up deciding to just forget about that email address and creating a new throw-away email used solely for instant messenger because that is what I was worried about the most.  I will not be able to stop it again if anyone hijacks my email account again and decides to spam others from it, but I will be aware that Microsoft does not want to fix the problem, only merely appear like they are taking some action.

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