Why Opera users can't purge spam in Hotmail

Many Opera users have recently complained that the HotMail service does not work well with the Opera browser. When Opera receives reports about pages or features not working, we investigate matters to see if the problem is due to a fault in the Opera browser. We have found no faults on our part in this case. Rather, we have confirmed an error in the pages you send to Opera. We have contacted Microsoft electronically on 2004-11-19 to alert them about these errors, but have received to answer nor correction of your service. Also, we have written them a letter on paper.

In order to replicate the problem, do the following:

1. Using Opera 7.54 (which you can download free of charge from www.opera.com), log into www.hotmail.com
2. Go to the "Mail" page.
3. Go to the "Junk E-mail" page in the left column.
4. Click "Empty". At this stage a pop-up window will appear.
5. Click "OK" in the popup window.

Clicking OK has no effect in Opera. This is due to you the underlying JavaScript code which is sent to Opera; the script Opera gets is incomplete because a required function called jmfPf is not included. Other browsers receive different versions of the script.

Since many of our users have accounts on HotMail, we ask Microsoft to correct the problem as soon as possible. We will happily assist them with further technical information if this is required to make the correction.