Could Hotmail drop mails to save bandwidth?
Could Hotmail silently drop emails with attachments just to save bandwidth and disk space? That's what Hal Licino pretends, and it made a lot of noise.
He has an interesting case but the claim is so far fetched that we are rightfully suspicious. Since his methodology is not obvious, it's hard to reproduce the results. I decided to retry the experiment in a way that others could verify easily.
Methodology
I created 3 brand new accounts on Hotmail, Google Mail, and Yahoo Mail. I deleted the welcome messages and sent 100 emails without attachment to them. Then I counted spam and mails in the inbox. I did it again with a picture attached to every mail.
In order to have legit looking mails, I included prose from the King James Bible in the messages. The Yould distribution includes a script to download the King James Bible from Project Gutenberg. I scanned it for complete sentences then randomly picked a few ones for each of the messages.