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."

Comments

How will this help

[pbranes]

How will keeping people from reading their email help reduce spam? Hotmail already limits you to sending ~100 messages/day.

Re:How will this help

[fdiskne1]

The article says this is to prevent one way the spammers send mass amounts of email. They sign up for multiple free accounts, then create a script that uses the Outlook/Outlook Express connection to Hotmail to send the max number of emails for each of these account automatically. This will slow down how fast the max number of messages are sent if they go the free route by making them use the web email access. If they decide to pay, then M$ makes more money and they can keep track of the credit cards used by the spammers so they can prevent them from opening accounts in the future. Of course, for the truly amoral spammers, they will just steal credit card numbers to use.

Are spammers the cyber-scapegoat?

[bigtallmofo]

I'm sure everyone else has noticed that the reason quoted for doing just about anything in the real world lately has been "to defeat terrorists". In fact, that's why I handed my latest project in late at work. It seems Microsoft is starting a trend to make spammers the cyber-equivalent of the terrorist scapegoat in the real world. This seems to me to be plain and simple that because of GMail, Microsoft can't use a ridiculous amount of storage (2 pitiful megs)as an incentive to pay them money that now they're looking for other features to take away to encourage people to pay up. I have a free Hotmail account and do use the Outlook Express option. It's a nice enough feature with plenty of annoyances, which is why I'm glad I switched my primary email account to Gmail some time ago.

Re:How about....

[hendridm]

Yeah, I agree. Disallowing Outlook is clearly a move to encourage people to upgrade. They have that right, but if I'm going to pay for e-mail, I'm going to pay for a quality service.

M$ doesn't know what to do with hotmail.

[nlinecomputers]

Though I am sure that Microsoft will deny this, when Microsoft purchased Hotmail it was to use as an advertising venue. I.E. they were going to spam you and sell your name to people that spam you. I've open accounts at hotmail and NEVER used them and had them fill with spam. Most of it porn. People got tired of that but without the ability to sell advertising I don't understand why Microsoft bothers.

Off to Gmail

[galtenberg]

Well, no Outlook Express, no reason to use Hotmail over Gmail. Thanks M$ for the impetus I needed.

And too bad your engineers just couldn't figure that spam problem out.

2MB was a joke

[JawFunk]

Personally, I signed up for hotmail when I needed a free email account and disliked the current format and disfunctionality of yahoo!mail. Since then however, hotmail dropped from 10MB to 2MB, and I can't even send myself 2 pictures. Ridiculous. This caused me to migrate away from hotmail back to yahoo, and this past weekend scored a gmail account, which doesn't force you to pick and choose what to keep before you have to put a VISA on file with hotmail.

I just hope that Gmail will soon develop pop3 support for Thunderbird. :(

We don't care about Outlook...

[rincebrain]

Does gotmail still work on free accounts? =) But seriously. You couldn't make stories this ludicrous up. Microsoft, on their capped-sends-per-day free e-mail service, declares that they want to cut down on spammers, so they eliminate the one feature that most Hotmail lusers love...being able to use it from the comfort of their home, ad-free. Meanwhile, they declared over a month ago that they would upgrade free account sizes [carrot and stick, anyone?], but now, when it comes into effect, only some accounts received the increase in space, and Microsoft cites unexpected capacity utilization. Let me get this straight. Microsoft offers you more space as A) an incentive to not switch services and B) to attract more customers, and then they A) cut off the convenient client interface to Hotmail and B) declare that there have been unexpected usage levels in space, and so have delayed the upgrades. In other words...Microsoft punishes their customers for staying with them and believing them about their upgraded features. Honest. I've seen more financially feasible situations in the Weekly World News.

Re:No lie.

[Phisbut]

I think its actually a *GOOD* idea that people are prevented from using outlook and or outlook express

What's funny with that is I've been having difficulties getting people switching from OE to Thunderbird as their mail client, because they all complained that Thunderbird didn't let them access their Hotmail account and OE was better at this...

I think Microsoft just made a very good marketing move on behalf of Thunderbird... :-D

Pity - WebDAV's great for contractors

[Timbotronic]

This announcement's a disgrace. Blatant move to force users to buy the 'premium' service. I work contracts all over the place and I've had a Hotmail account for years - for the simple reason that WebDAV's great when you're working behind a corporate firewall. A lot of companies block access to external POP3 or IMAP accounts and even more block SMTP out (as they should). WebDAV, which uses good old HTTP port 80 is usually fine.

Haven't used GMail yet, but I'd always prefer to have a local email client anyway. More features, local storage and offline access.

Guess it's finally goodbye to Hotmail. Any other mail services out there that use WebDAV?

tcp/25 SHOULD be blocked

[macdaddy]

"Soon it will be all but impossible to operate a local mail server due to blocked ports on your providers end."

As I've said many times, unless you're paying for that kind of access you shouldn't be running a MTA to begin with. The days of open and free can no longer exist on the Internet, people. I wish ya'll figure that out, stop bitching about it and move on. When 99.9999999% of the people on Internet are too incompotent to secure a mail server (mail as an example; all others servers can be inserted here) and keep it secure then they absolutely no justification for those ports to be kept open. We're far and away in the minority when it comes to compotent computer administrators. ISPs should not be expected to cater to the advanced skills and desires of 0.0000001 % of their possible customer base. If we want that level of service then we should have to pay for it.