Hotmail On Your Desktop

thomas2you writes "Microsoft has just started its beta testing on a new program, made to have Microsoft's hotmail on your own desktop according to an article on CNET. It's going to be free software, you're going to be able to manage multiple accounts and they are attempting to include the ability to also just control all pop3 and smtp accounts you have, including Google's gmail as well as Windows Live Mail, the successor to Hotmail. From the article, 'The move is a shift for the Hotmail business, which in the past, has charged users who wanted to read their mail using desktop software, rather than a Web browser. Microsoft charged $20 and up for its paid service.'"

Comments

Three questions:

[SanityInAnarchy]

Why the FUCK do you get a Hotmail account if you don't want to use a Web browser? I thought the whole point was that to most people, Hotmail == Webmail, at least until they learn about Gmail?

And, more importantly...

Why the FUCK won't they just use IMAP? At least Gmail has a decent excuse -- their system doesn't map well straight onto IMAP. But Hotmail is just like any other email system. And Thunderbird already knows how to handle multiple IMAP and POP3 accounts, which begs the question...

Why the FUCK are they developing and releasing new software on the client side for this?

It sure as hell isn't because they want to improve the user experience. If they did, they'd pay Google to run Hotmail for them.