Spambots can be prevented with a decent Captcha.
Which is why we catch 99% of the spambots. The remaining 1% still cause manual cleanup work.
The trolls and !@#$%^&s thing is illogical because unless you literally kicked every user from the game who had a hotmail from the game the first time the ban went into effect, it could simply be a coincidence.
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. Early in the game we banned people individually. Only after we realized that the vast majority of them were hotmail users did we ban hotmail completely.
As to you hurting hotmail, that's more or less an unintentional lie on your part as you aren't hurting hotmail. When a hotmail user comes to BM and finds out they have to make a new email account in order to play the game, more often than not, they just don't join the game because they don't have any real reason to suggest that BM is so much better than other games if they haven't already played. I probably wouldn't have joined if the ban was in effect when I joined.
People said the same thing about IE users back when BM started to be intentionally hostile to them. Maybe we lost some players, but that is what a free game can afford and a commercial one can't (without the stakeholders whining about lost profits): Have ethics. Not in some high-level meaning-of-life sense, but in the simple sense of considering things to be right or wrong.
I am not hurting hotmail because it loses users. Even if 5 people switched away from hotmail due in small part to BM (e.g. being so interested they sign up with some other service just to test out BM and then find that other service is better) that's not something hotmail even notices.
But you can say the same thing about the one guy standing up to the injustice in his country. It's got millions of people and his one act won't make a difference. And yet, it does. Because it's about doing the right thing, not about maximizing ROI.
I also found that free mails like hotmail are much less targeted than other "higher quality emails" because of free mails better anti-spam technology. Here
That may be true for their analysis.
Again,
I see the actual spambot registrations. That's not an abstract statistics. Here's the spambots that the anti-spam gate blocked for manual investigation
just in the past 12 hours:
Now stop telling me I'm seeing ghosts.