For those of you still using Outlook Express to retrieve mail from their free Hotmail account will have to find an alternative sometime in early 2005.

Microsoft have said they are stopping it due to spam concerns, but aren’t they lucky that it adds value to their paid service as well?
Actually, in this case, I agree with them. One of the ways to make Spamming easy via webmail is to provide access to external local mail clients. I doubt many spammers want to try and use a web interface to send mail, and the only alternative on Hotmail now will be to try and code a script using something like Perl’s LWP module to simulate a browser login.

Now Microsoft just has to think of a way to stop paid users from registering with stolen credit card numbers and setting up SPAM ops from there.

Regards

Franki

This article was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 at 9:19 am