Can having cookies block me from reading my messages on hotmail

Just about everyone now has at least one email address. Many people have a Hotmail account for their main email address. When a person has a Hotmail email account they may encounter several questions especially if a problem arises while they are trying to read their email. One popular problem people encounter happens with cookies when they are trying to access their Hotmail account. This article will discuss what cookies are and how to deal with them when accessing Hotmail.

What is a cookie

Cookies are used on certain internet sites on the World Wide Web to collect information about a person. Most of the reasons that information is collected using cookies are for commercial reasons. The sites want to put different things on the screen that match a person's personality so they will find them more interesting. Cookies are small files that contain an identity code. The computer that a person uses accepts the cookie and then stores it. The next time that a person visits the site, it is retrieved and the person's identity is established. Cookies are usually limited in size, around 4k, so it generally does not have very much information.

How it collects information

The cookies collect information by keeping a record of the sites that a person visits. This gives the sites with the cookies an idea of what a person likes or has preferences to. After a person visits a site for the second or maybe third time they want to be able to refer to the record from the first visit so they can update it. If the person hasn't register as a visitor to a particular site it can be hard to actually identify someone, so that is why they use cookies.

What is inside a cookie

Usually a cookie will store things about a person such as how long they stay at a particular site, what pages they visit, what page the person came from before, and what a person buys. A person's data file is used to personalize the screen to them. The advertisements will be about things that a particular person is interested in.

If a person does not give an internet site their personal information, cookies will not have it. But the second that someone buys something, or enters their email address or name, then the data file will now recognize that individual and not just their web surfing habits.

Privacy

The use of cookies is pretty controversial, but they are used very often. A lot of popular internet sites and search engines use cookies. Most of the time cookies do not contain a person's personal information; they will usually use it only as an identifier. The majority of a person's information is in a large file at the site server end. The cookie's purpose is to make sure that the accurate data file is used. The data files at the server end usually don't contain personal details or a person's name, but if someone uses the Internet for shopping, their information will be in the larger data file.

Cookies and Hotmail

If a person has a Hotmail email account, they will have to enable cookies to bet past the security check, "match the picture" and access their email. To do this a person will need to go into IE, then click on "Tools", click on "Internet Options Privacy', and then click `Default". Next they should press "Clear your cookies" just in case there is a current cookie that is causing difficulties with Hotmail. So they should go back into IE, then again to "Tools", then to "Internet" "Options General", and click on "Delete Cookies". To clear their cache, if a cached page is not properly refreshed, the person should go to IE, and then "Tools", "Internet Options General". Next they should press "Delete Files" and check on the "Delete all offline content" button before pressing "OK."