Microsoft fixes Hotmail forwarding glitch

If Sivakumar Nadarajah hadn't been sending himself email, he might not have discovered that Microsoft's Hotmail was losing his forwarded messages.

"I noticed this bug when I tried to forward a mail from Hotmail to my office account, which came from a Hotmail user," Nadarajah wrote in an email interview. "It never reached me (I tried three times). Then I spent a whole night to find the actual problem."

The problem, it turned out, was that the email service was failing to forward messages originally sent between two Hotmail accounts to a third non-Hotmail address.

But a page on the free Web-based service was confirming that messages were forwarded when they hadn't gone anywhere.

Microsoft today said it had patched the bug.

Nadarajah, an engineer with iGate Capital, previously unearthed another Hotmail problem that threatened the account security of members who accessed their accounts through public terminals.