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Hotmail Cracks Down on Spam
Magmar writes "The team at Microsoft has decided to restrict free users from using Outlook and Outlook Express for managing email. This is going to be reserved for those who will pay for their accounts. The reason given for restricting the WebDav access of Outlook and Outlook Express is to prevent spammers from abusing the free service."
Actual link to article - http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1652391,00.as p
Not to be a grammar/spelling nazi, but wtf is -
"Microsoft not anticipating the storage that user of the free email accounts..."
More like (FTA)-
"We are seeing customers consuming more storage than we anticipated, and we're bringing more storage online," she said.
I would think this wouldn't have gotten past the eds...But in any case, hope this clears things up.
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
Hotmail's WebDAV interface was, and apparently still is, riddled with holes that prevented spammers from using it in the same way they were abusing the formmail.pl scripts a few years ago.
Microsoft announced time after time that they'd plugged those holes, but every time within a month or two spammers found another hole, and started abusing the Hotmail WebDAV interface again.
There's plenty of discussion on this on news.admin.net-abuse.email over the years.
I don't think it ever was as bad as formmail.pl was, but there were a few high profile spammers specializing in using Hotmail WebDAV exploits.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
It used to be up till 2.1.0. Download v2.1.0 or you'll have to pay after 100 e-mails xfered.
I've used Yahoo!Pops for years to check my yahoo account (ever since they cut off free access to pop3). Too bad the parent's solution is shareware and not freeware.
Both work great, though. They use the standard HTTP interface like a webbrowser (http-get?) instead of that stupid WebDAV protocol. A little slower than WebDAV, probably, but better than using a browser.