Slashdot Mirror
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."
Just read access, and you have to use your own ISP's server for outbound SMTP?
How does receiving by WebDAV help spammers that much?
So much for hotwayd, the only reason I kept my hotmail account.
"Records show we have 100 million users. Finance records show 75 million are non-paying. We will need at *least* 18,600 TB of storage.
-- My Sig is a P228.
How could they not anticipate the storage needed? Take the number of accounts that had 2 megs and add 250 to that, and then figure in the projected growth for a however long. Not really that difficult..
The grammar we're seeing in Slashdot article summaries has become similar to the Cialis ads I see in my mailbox.
So has the summary content, frankly. There's been more to do with product sales and enhancements of a commercial basis than I've ever seen.
Though I don't think I'd give it up outright, Slashdot is becoming a harder read lately.
"with Microsoft not anticipating the storage that user of the free email accounts."
/. troll babelfished thier press release, and found this secret message.
/., and use google to englishize them.
I think I know what this says, it seems to change whenever I read it.
"Hotmail Hopes To Block Spam with New Fee"
babelfish.av.com Bullshit -> English > Microsoft want to charge more people, and realised that they can do this by stopping outlook and hotmail working together for free. When the new Asok type intern said people might be upset, they look around and saw that thier secret hidden spam division were using outloko to send hotmail users spam. A few days later when the penny dropped they gleefully crafted some press released to give to the whoring IT news community. Unfortunately a
OK so babelfish isn't good at 1:1 translations.
Have you seen how good babelfish and google translating is now? *impressed* I write all my posts in klingon, like any true
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I got my first Hotmail account in '94, I think it was. Great service then, even my non-computer-literate parents loved it, but nowadays it's got nothing on the other e-mail providers out there. Hotmail's got a cruddy, hard-to-use GUI and they annoy the hell out of you with pedantic "warnings" about the need to upgrade to their ridiculous pay service so you don't lose e-mail, contract herpes, etc. Hotmail does a good job of proving that "you get what you pay for," but Microsoft seems intent on not going beyond a certain level of usability in Hotmail - add space, take away Outlook funtionality - and I don't see how making it harder to use the free service will win them paying customers. I also don't see how any spammer who's actually making a buck won't just upgrade and keep on spammin' - or just use another service. (Something tells me the spammers who're using Hotmail aren't quite the cream of the crop...) Hotmail gives Microsoft a great advertising base, I guess, but the only reason I use that old account now is for sites that need a confirmed address. Yahoo's been much more reliable and I can actually see and use my 100 mb inbox there.
This is a joke, it's nothing more than a money grab. Charging people for *how* they access their mail? That's ridiculous. If they were really that bothered about spam they could simply limit the Outlook access to receive only and block sending. Like how an ISP will let you receive your POP3 mail but won't allow you to send if you're connected through a different ISP.
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
I don't see what the big deal is with allowing OE and Outlook to use the webdav on the free accounts. I don't think the vast amount of abuse comes from those clients.
I think it comes from(in order):
1) Spoofing the from. Duh.
2) People scripting access to the site, much quicker than relying on outlook.
As usual, it's a company creating more problems to spit at a problem they aren't going to fix, and indeed can't fix except with really good spam filters, and sender id(tee hee).
Chris
Fortunate for Microsoft, blocking Outlook Express et al from Hotmail forces users to use the web interface, which contains plenty of ads. Unless of course the user is a payer..
http://mrpostman.sourceforge.net/ for all, I say.
Is it just me or does it seem that every day brings a story of how Microsoft was unable to correctly predict the magnitude of an upgrade or alteration.
I'm thinking about how Longhorn is delayed and the scope is cutailed. SP2 had delay after delay. Now this cock-up with the upgrade of accounts because they did not think that users would use the space.
Oh gmail, when will you come to our aid?
"Complete your sentences, people!"
Or, maybe 'sentences' is the verb in which case one is left wondering what the sentence might be. 10-15 years of hard labor, maybe?
"Judge Complete sentences people to life imprisonment for being grammar nazis."
Works for me.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Yahoo mail did the same thing around 2 years ago. They used to allow POP3 access to the free mail accounts (although they didn't publicize it very much). They pulled that connectivity a couple years ago, reserving it only for the paying accounts.
I don't see what this has to do with spam - its simply an incentive to get people to send them money.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Oh well, lets not worry about hotmail! I think its actually a *GOOD* idea that people are prevented from using outlook and or outlook express :) And Microsoft came up with this idea?? Thats two birds with one stone. Bring on the Gmail!
Ps. I still have gmail invites for those that want one.
First, they announce that they aren't going to release more patches for versions of IE earlier than XP, which will hopefully precipitate a greater shift from IE to FireFox (and other 3rd party alternatives). Then they announce that they aren't going to support direct access from Outlook/OE to Hotmail, which may be the only thing in some cases holding people to them over Mozilla, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc. (More to OE than Outlook admittedly, but there are other calendar applications out there).
I know at least when I was using Outlook Express, one of the last things that kept me holding on was the convenience of checking Hotmail through OE. But after I looked around and found projects like Mr Postman, Blue HTTPMail and a dozen other projects on SourceForge, which let you access Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail from any mail client you want, I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird, and I've never looked back.
At a time when Microsoft *really* need to be consolidating and concentrating on getting people to stay with their systems, the last thing they should be doing is antagonising people time and time again, by trying to try and squeeze more money out of them. Cutting down on spammers is an utterly poor excuse for turning off that service, it's clearly just an excuse to get more people to switch to payed services. Granted they still have enough of a market share to be able to pull stunts like this time and time again, but when they spend the time and effort on FUD campaigns against Linux, while simultaneously making business decisions that could aggravate users into switching to open source apps or even right over to Linux, their business plan seems somewhat contradictory. Sure you could claim that it's really not a big deal which will create dozens of new Linux users, and that's possibly true. But with the JPEG exploit, with the SP2 problems, with the recent patch announcements... these things all add up.
Its a lot easier to send 100 messages a day from Outlook than it is from Hotmail. So if you still want to spam it will take you longer. If you have multiple email accounts to get around the limit then this will reduce the number that you can send.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Can't they just send 100 messages each with 200 receipients? And repeat this from their 100 accounts?
Almost all spam software considers any message with 200 recipients as spam unless you whitelist the sender.
The whole idea of their disallowing non-paying customers to use WebDav is to make it harder for spammers to setup multiple accounts to send 100 from each account. I would bet they will lower the amount of email allowed per day for nonpaying customers to something closer to 50 as well.
It is somewhat easier for them to filter out spammers if they are using the web interface, and they don't need to worry too much about paying customers sending spam since they must provide a credit card, and thus are traceable.
Not a cureall, but sounds like a very reasonable plan to me. You can say "Pfah" if you like, but would you rather they did nothing? As it stands, I get the LEAST amount of spam through my networks (talking thousands per day) from Hotmail and AOL, which use a more restrictive method for sending mail than most ISPs/mail providers.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
This is not just about getting people to upgrade to the premium service... it's yet another "heads I win, tails you lose" offer from Micro$oft. How else do all you freeloaders think you're going to get to see those really useful (& expensive) ads on msn if you never actually visit the web page and login?
If course, for the truly amoral spammers, they will just steal credit card numbers to use.
Not a question of morality, more a question of whether they run the risks. SPAM isn't likely to get you hunted down unless you really piss somebody off. Stealing CC'ing generalls pisses off Visa... them having lots of money to deal with CC scammers, and lots of lawyers to sue said scammers into oblivion.
But preventing non-spammer users from using the notoriously virus-prone Outlook interface to read their email reduces the chances that they'll get infected, so their machines are less likely to be turned into spam-sending zombies. This is a Good Thing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks