I don't use my nine year old Windows Live Mail Hotmail account for anything other than Messenger and Xbox Live anymore. But today, when Messenger notified me that I had 30 new emails, I had to go check. And what did I see?

Every single one of those 30 emails is spam. No, not tricky, legitimate-looking spam. Blatantly obvious "Viagra" and "Rolex Replicas" spam. And they're all in my inbox. And yes, the junk mail setting is properly set to "Standard" mode.

For comparison's sake, my Gmail account (which, again, I only use for GTalk) has 309 pieces of spam, all of which were rightfully banished to the "Spam" folder. The built-in IMF filter on our Exchange server is also remarkably effective.

So what's up, Microsoft? Is this a temporary glitch, or is the Hotmail spam filter really, really bad?