[dba-Tech] Microsoft ends free Hotmail access from Outlook

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/28/hotmail_from_outlook_fees/
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/28/hotmail_from_outlook_fees/> 


Microsoft ends free Hotmail access from Outlook

By Andrew
<http://forms.theregister.co.uk/mail_author/?story_url=/2004/09/28/hotmail_f
rom_outlook_fees/> Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Tuesday 28th September 2004 10:32 GMT

Hotmail users who use Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express clients will
now have to pay for the privilege. Users must sign up to either a Hotmail
Plus account for $19.95 a year or an MSN Premium account, at $99.95 a year
to continue accessing the service from their desktop client.

Microsoft cited abuse by spammers as the reason. Because its email clients
are scriptable, Microsoft had been grappling with spammers who automated the
sign-up and bulk sending processes. Rivals such as Yahoo! also charge a
premium for POP3 access to their email services.

 
This being Microsoft, things aren't straightforward. Just as Outlook uses
common email protocols and obfuscates them in dense wrappings of RPC (Remote
Procedure Calls), Hotmail shuns POP3 for a Microsoft implementation of
WebDAV, a much richer web publishing protocol for which email is just one
application. So, apart from a few clever hacks, client access to Hotmail has
been limited to Microsoft email clients. Ximian's Connector software scrapes
Exchange Server's WebDAV interface to provide Office interoperability for
its Linux desktop, so it's theoretically possible that third party email
clients will take up the onerous challenge. It's just very unlikely that
they'll see much reward in the task.®
 
 
 
Jon


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