Re: Hotmail's trying to get me to stop using OE to check my mail.
- From: <Vanguard>
- Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 00:19:31 -0500
"Ryan Cabanas" <jimmyrig1042@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:uZe1sTuSFHA.2128@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Just out of curiosity, would someone be able to provide me with a link so that I can read up on how Microsoft's anti-spam attempts lead to the discontinuance of OE access to your Hotmail account? Thanks.
Ryan Cabanas
<Vanguard> wrote in message news:O4vzGVtSFHA.3552@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"Ryan Cabanas" <jimmyrig1042@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:O0vl9rsSFHA.628@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI have a few really old Hotmail accounts that are still able to be used with OE. The one that I mainly use has been getting a lot of flak from Hotmail lately. They will temporarily stop my OE access to the account and then send me an email saying that I need to verify the account. So I have to go to the link and type in the stupid letters and numbers and then I can use OE with it again. Seems to be getting worse. Should I expect that access via OE will just be shut down permanently in the very near future if I don't wish to pay for OE access?
Hotmail accounts created before 27-Sep-2004 were grandfathered in to leave them with WebDAV access from Outlook [Express]. That doesn't mean that their anti-spam measures for freebie accounts won't also affect your old freebie accounts. The intervening security authentication page is an anti-spam measure to prevent spammers from scripting their client to walk through the webmail pages to spew spam from Hotmail. If you don't want your freebie Hotmail account occasionally going dead which requires you use their webmail interface to get past the intervening security page then pay for your Hotmail account.
Freebie accounts will occasionally get hit with requiring the intervening security page. Doesn't matter that you have a grandfathered account. It is a freebie account and this anti-spam measure applies against all freebie accounts. I got tired of having to requalify my account by using their webmail interface to requalify my account, so I abandoned it. I see Yahoo is starting to do the same for their freebie accounts (which causes a similar lockout when using YahooPOPs with freebie Yahoo Mail accounts; see http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=1975). I wasn't going to waste my money on a Hotmail account (and won't waste it on Yahoo Mail, either). So while they still provide freebie accounts, they pretty much are pushing their users to use their webmail interface.
Outlook and Outlook Express use WebDAV which is a scripting language. Their WebDAV server understands the commands sent to it from a WebDAV-enabled client. From some searches, I found the following (but this list is not exhaustive):
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2518.txt http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/e2k3/e2k3/_techsel_tech_9.asp http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/en/server/iis/default.asp?url=/windows2000/en/server/iis/htm/core/wcwdcp.htm http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/3cbec1c7-e3ed-43d3-86e8-ce94e4375e70.mspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wss/wss/_exch2k_http_webdav_access.asp
If you have a freebie Hotmail account (that wasn't grandfathered in), WebDAV support is disabled for those freebie accounts. That means WebDAV-enabled clients cannot communicate with that server. The paid Hotmail accounts have WebDAV enabled so Outlook and OE can use it to talk with their WebDAV mail server. While IIS versions 5 and 6 also have WebDAV support, it is more likely that Hotmail is using Microsoft's Exchange server with its WebDAV support.
So spammers that used WebDAV to script their spewage through Hotmail won't work anymore with freebie accounts because those accounts don't have WebDAV enabled at the server for that mailbox. It is unlikely that many spammers will bother to get a paid Hotmail account in order that WebDAV be enabled for their Hotmail mailbox. They'll probably focus more on creating zombied hosts from stupid users that install their mailer daemon trojans.
By killing off WebDAV support for non-grandfathered Hotmail accounts, they were attempting to kill off spammers that used to use WebDAV to script they way through Hotmail to spew their crap from there. By occasionally inserting the intervening security page, they are attempting to thwart spammers that use screen scraping to use a program to automatically navigate their web pages to do the same thing. The spammer might put in a conditional test to check for the security page but they won't be able to read the graphical box to know what characters to push into the login credentials.
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