MSN Forces Outlook POP

Phoenix-D writes: "Qwest.net, my Phoenix-area DSL provider and ISP, recently decided to hand over their ISP buisness to MSN. No huge deal, right? Well, check out this blurb: 'Due to the Microsoft anti-spam initiative, customers are restricted to use their mail services. Therefore, POP3 service is only available when using MSN Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, or Microsoft Outlook Express.'" Awesome. Microsoft's Anti-Spam initiative forces POP users to use the primary sender of mail worms.

Comments

already slashdotted? Well how can they tell

[GlassUser]

cached at http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:Hj0Zy1r9WSc:w ww.qwest.net/nav4/msn/faq.html+&hl=en
Well, it loaded now, but it's slow.

Any way, how can the tell what POP3 you're using? And why would POP3 stop spam? Wouldn't SMTP be where the action is? (I'm assuming that's what they mean). Are they looking at headers (easily emulated by spamware, ineffective) or some other signature? And I don't see how this will stop spam, anything like that is easily emulated. More and more stupidity.

Talk about anticompetitive...

[Logic Bomb]

I can't imagine a better example of anti-competitive practices. MS is going to force people who never selected them as an ISP to use MS software in a manner that does not at all aid "anti-spam initiatives" and, as the post pointed out, will almost certainly make related problems even worse. How on earth does *anything* related to what client is used to access a POP3 server effect spam??? SMTP would at least seem in the ballpark, but POP?

if they really wanted to stop spam

[linuxpng]

When you sign up for a passport id with a hotmail account they wouldn't sell that address to everyone under the sun.

I signed up for hotmail before MS ever took it over. I never used the email address in any form online, never even had any mail to it. I basically just had it because. After MS took over it litterally filled the account with junk mail.

One way to find out...

[Xibby]

telnet popserver.msn.com 110
user user
pass password
list

Replace popserver.msn.com with the actual pop3 server. I have no clue what it actually is.

Re:what?!

[wishus]

the list goes on and on. how can we stand by and just let this shit continue? how can you?

I don't. I haven't and won't buy Windows XP. I paid $40 for a boxed SuSE distro, to financially support an alternative. I don't buy any MS software, because I think it's crap.

That is how capitalism works - the people "vote" with their money. I can't think of a single common application that Microsoft can do that can't be done on mac, linux, solaris, etc.

The government does not exist to protect stupid consumers from themselves. If you want to change the software industry, start spending money in it.

Not when they are an anti-competitive monopoly.

[Flower]

They are leveraging a subsidiary to force users onto their products exclusively. People would have to dump or not even consider other products like Netscape, Opera, Evolution, Eudora, etc to access a basic service. If you read the FAQ you'd notice that they currently have to delay migrating the Mac users because they can't provide all the services Windows users will be getting on MSN.

While I agree that this isn't exactly a rights issue, I complete disagree that MSN or MS can do whatever they want. The FOF has survived appeal and it is now a brave new world for MS. Every move they make is fair game for legal scurtiny. You can cry about the supposed free market all you want but that ain't the real world and in this case I'd rather nip this in the bud before MSN gets a stranglehold share in the marketplace.

Uh....

[Scoria]

How is it advantageous to force users to use Outlook for mail retrieval in order to prevent spam?

There may be some decent reason to do it with SMTP, but not with POP. That's simply an excuse to restrict their users to their product...