Hotmail to wean users from free export tool
Found on CNet News on Sunday, 26 September 2004
Starting Monday, MSN will grant use of Web DAV tools only to paid subscribers of Hotmail, which starts at $19.95. However, Hotmail subscribers who have previously used the technology, an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of its total 187 million customers, will be able to continue to use it for free through March or April of 2005.
"We've seen spammers exploiting this Web DAV protocol, and we're going to make a change to help curb its abuse. New spammers won't be able to set up of free accounts" to send junk e-mail, said Brook Richardson, lead product manager for MSN communications services.
Not only is this a "move to stop spam", but also a try to increase income. After all, the only thing Hotmail is good for are throw-away accounts. Need an email for signing up with some service which forces you to provide an email address? Use Hotmail. Although it is nice that you can get the mails through 3rd party tool with eg. Thunderbird, I won't have to think much when it comes to "pay or go". Besides, if the spammers would really be the problem, why not simply add a timeout, so you can send eg. one mail per minute only? Furthermore, it would be easy to write a program to send mails anyway. I wrote a "Webmail to POP3/SMTP" proxy back when Angelfire was still working.