September 26, 2004 9:00 PM PDT
Hotmail to wean users from free export tool
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Hotmail, the Internet portal's Web-based e-mail service, has long offered subscribers the ability to use a technology standard known as Web DAV (Web distributed authoring and versioning) to download e-mail from Hotmail into Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express for free.
Starting Monday, MSN will grant use of Web DAV tools only to paid subscribers of Hotmail, which starts at $19.95. However, Hotmail subscribers who have previously used the technology, an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of its total 187 million customers, will be able to continue to use it for free through March or April of 2005.
"We've seen spammers exploiting this Web DAV protocol, and we're going to make a change to help curb its abuse. New spammers won't be able to set up of free accounts" to send junk e-mail, said Brook Richardson, lead product manager for MSN communications services.
"We felt we needed to make a decision for the greater good, not only for Hotmail users, but also for the whole e-mail ecosystem," Richardson said.
Hotmail users will still be able to import e-mail from third-party services using POP (Post Office Protocol).
The move is only the latest technology front MSN has put up to staunch spam. Previously, Hotmail has started requiring new subscribers to input an authorization code before signing up, in order to prove they're not a spam robot.
Yahoo and America Online have similarly restricted access to e-mail exporting tools to only paid subscribers.
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much, even though gmail's web interface is so much nicer than
hotmail's. the reason? WebDAV. Thanks to WebDAV I can check
hotmail on my Mac with Mail.app (thanks to a plug-in written by
Daniel Parnell), on my Windows PC with Outlook Express, and
when I'm away from either of my computers, via the web. It
doesn't get any better than that. But now, without WebDAV,
Gmail looks WAY better than Hotmail. When WebDAV goes
away, so does my use of Hotmail.
It is SO obviously nothing to do with spam and is just a ploy to make people pay for what used to come as standard (and has the added "benefit" of forcing users to look at advertising and pop ups).
Microsoft has stripped back Hotmail features one by one in a cyncical attempt to screw money out of users. You can't even keep copies of your sent mail for any length of time (even though you are WELL within your storage limits).
How much do you want a bet that they switch off WebDav access a hell of a lot fater than they upgrade accounts to 250MB storage.
We wrote a HotMail Inbox Watcher Klip that lets anyone monitor their HotMail Inbox for new messages ? and see a preview ? without having to manually login to check their messages.
In creating the HotMail Inbox Watcher, we got the strong sense that the only other companies using HotMail/WebDav were spammers exploiting Microsoft HotMail.
We would like to see some Microsoft support an API for HotMail so other sanctioned applications could integrate with HotMail and increase its value for end-users.
The HotMail Inbox Watcher Klip runs in KlipFolio, a platform for intelligent awareness of changes to remote data. KlipFolio is free for personal, non-commercial use and available at CNet Downloads.
You can download it at http://www.download.com/Serence-KlipFolio/3000-9227-10283770.html?tag=lst-0-1
Regards,? Fred
"old"devildog
I use Hotmail only as a backup and OE only because it lets me use Hotmail with my IMAP amd POP accounts in one app. If I'm forced to use web-based mail, then goodbye Hotmail and goodbye Outlook. I'll go back to Pegasus and Eudora, and check out Gmail.