This is just another case of Microsoft's paranoia dictating their actions. In a consistently insecure attempt to keep everything under control, they are now inflicting their Borg-like assimilation techniques on other companies' marketing strategies, not just their technology.
By flattening everything out, they take the magic out of what their competitors have to offer. Since they have the monopoly position, this gives them the advantage.
The advantage for laptop users is that you don't have to keep altering your smarthost/relay settings. You can just set your smarthost to 127.0.0.1 and then never have to touch it again. Otherwise you have to keep changing the smarthost depending on whether you're using your dialup at home, or whether you're at your friend's house, or whether you want to send personal mail whilst you're at work, etc...
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This is just another case of Microsoft's paranoia dictating their actions. In a consistently insecure attempt to keep everything under control, they are now inflicting their Borg-like assimilation techniques on other companies' marketing strategies, not just their technology. By flattening everything out, they take the magic out of what their competitors have to offer. Since they have the monopoly position, this gives them the advantage.
The advantage for laptop users is that you don't have to keep altering your smarthost/relay settings. You can just set your smarthost to 127.0.0.1 and then never have to touch it again. Otherwise you have to keep changing the smarthost depending on whether you're using your dialup at home, or whether you're at your friend's house, or whether you want to send personal mail whilst you're at work, etc...