[techtalk] Bad surfing habbits part two

[James Sutherland]

On Sun, 27 May 2001, Elizabeth wrote:

> Liese wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > James wrote :
> > "Beware of driving your users to using a webmail service, though; if you
> > stop them using your mail system, they could switch to Hotmail or similar."
> > I have disabled Hotmail (and others) on our proxy server. This has saved us
> > huge amount of surfing time.. :) Really, some users were on this site for
> > more then 200 hours a month, refreshing often.
>
> mail.yahoo.com is the yahoo mail site.  Maybe if you disallowed all
> the others but allowed this one domain than people could use that?

AIUI, Liese's aim was specifically to prevent access to webmail!

> That way, they can use the mail, but not peruse the incredibly huge
> amount of other features that yahoo intices people with.  Is their a
> similar domain for hotmail or is it the huge query string dealy?

Hotmail is just a mail service - the other services live under the MSN
brand.

> If they had access to the other mail services, maybe that would
> prevent them from hogging all of your bandwidth.

On the contrary: it would be much WORSE! Instead of mail to each other
being purely internal - i.e. not touching external bandwidth - every
single e-mail check would generate external Net traffic!

> It might also encourage them to access all the questionable emails
> through those services.

Um, the aim is to stop them using those services in the first place ;-)

> > Greetings,
> > liese
> >
> > Ps: im sorry for the occasional spelling error.. english isnt my native
> > language..
> >
> I didn't even notice.  :-)

I've seen worse from natives, certainly - I'd say the English was good by
any standards, second language or not!


James.