GAH!!!!!

*retch* bl00dy micro$oft have done it again.

I, like squillions of others around the world, use Outlook to access my hotmail account.
So, imagine my extreme frustration to not be able to access it today.

only upon digging around in the FAQ of hotmail do I find…

Can’t access my free account from Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express

To protect our users from the increasing amount of unsolicited junk e-mail or spam sent from MSN Hotmail accounts through Outlook and Outlook Express, we have reluctantly had to restrict the new use of Outlook and Outlook Express to subscribers only.

By making this feature part of a subscription (which requires a user to provide billing information), we can more effectively manage and put a stop to the abuse of this feature, and help protect you and others from unsolicited mail.

If you purchase a subscription service such as MSN Hotmail Plus, or MSN Premium, you get access to your account from Outlook or Outlook Express, along with many other added features. To see other benefits of upgrading your MSN Hotmail or MSN accounts or to create a new subscription account, visit our subscription information page.

SO ANNOYING!!! Not only was there no warning from Mr Gates but I first thought it was simply my settings so I cleared the account in Outlook and started again. So now I’ve lost all the emails from Outlook. Of course, they’re nice and safe on the Hotmail server but I have to use the web interface.

Gah.
Bloody Gah.

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This Post Has 7 Comments

    1. David Ould

      but can it access hotmail?

      this is the question. Plus I like the integration of Outlook with my other Office stuff

      1. the_least

        Ahh, I foolishly assumed that Hotmail allows PoP access, but no, they have their own proprietry protocol which only works with Outlook. More MS junk.

        My advice (radical as it may seem): ditch Outlook in favour of Thunderbird and Hotmail in favour of GMail. Give MS the finger.

        1. anitra

          Actually,Hotmail worked with POP until very recently… you could access it with anything that used POP (like my “real” webmail account at Fastmail.FM). That’s the whole point of this – MS announced a while back (in a very quiet whisper) that they would eventually be discontinuing POP access for free Hotmail users.

          So far, mine is still working, but I doubt that will continue for long.

    1. David Ould

      a little bit of research tells me that they’re unrolling it globally over the next few weeks.

      Migrate now!

      I’m switching to gmail!

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