Microsoft to charge for Hotmail w/ OE - Please DON'T!!

From: keeps99 (keeps99_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 09/27/04 

Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 15:17:04 -0700

Microsoft has announced they will start charging extra to allow users to use
Outlook and Outlook Express with Hotmail Accounts. Please, Don't Do it! I
like saving my messages off and keeping them offline. Offline, I have every
email I have sent or received in the last 4 years... This is wrong - there
must be some way to get around it - there must be another solution!! PLEASE!
 Please listen to your user community. User's Unite. Voice your opinion!!

News Item Follows:

Microsoft Adds New Hotmail Fee
 
To curb spam, users will be charged for accessing their e-mail via Outlook.

Joris Evers, IDG News Service
Monday, September 27, 2004
Microsoft will start charging for a Hotmail feature that allows users of the
Web-based e-mail service to access their e-mail using the Outlook e-mail
client.

  
Microsoft is making the move not to increase the number of paying Hotmail
users but because the feature is being abused by senders of spam, says Brooke
Richardson, lead product manager for MSN at Microsoft.

"Essentially what spammers do is create scripts so they can rapid-fire
e-mail from Outlook or Outlook Express and pop off a hundred e-mails from
each of those Hotmail accounts in rapid succession," Richardson says. "On
certain days we have seen tens of thousands of Hotmail accounts set up and
spamming in this matter."

To prevent abuse of the feature, Microsoft will stop making it available to
new users of free Hotmail and MSN mail accounts starting this week. Current
users can continue to use the feature but will be asked to become Hotmail
subscribers over the coming months. By April next year, the feature will no
longer be available for free, Richardson says.

The Hotmail and MSN mail feature is known as WebDAV, after the Web-based
Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol that enables it. It is
enabled on about 5 percent, or 9.4 million, of the 187 million active Hotmail
accounts, according to Richardson.

For the Greater Good?
While the decision to make the link with Outlook or Outlook Express a paid
service won't be welcome news to some users, Microsoft had to take the step
"for greater good" of the Hotmail and e-mail community, Richardson says.

Furthermore, rival Web-based e-mail providers such as Yahoo already charge
for similar functionality, she says.

Other actions that Microsoft has taken to prevent abuse of Hotmail by
senders of spam include a limit on outgoing messages of 100 per day on free
accounts and an extra validation requirement when signing up for an account,
Richardson says. "We do a lot of stuff in terms of understanding the
characteristics of spammers so we can watch for them and shut them down when
we see them," she says.

Users who want to use WebDAV to link their Hotmail or MSN mail to an Outlook
can subscribe to Hotmail Plus, which also offers 2GB of e-mail space and an
account that doesn't expire, for $19.95 per year, or to MSN Premium for
$99.95 a year.

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