Hotmail On Your Desktop

thomas2you writes "Microsoft has just started its beta testing on a new program, made to have Microsoft's hotmail on your own desktop according to an article on CNET. It's going to be free software, you're going to be able to manage multiple accounts and they are attempting to include the ability to also just control all pop3 and smtp accounts you have, including Google's gmail as well as Windows Live Mail, the successor to Hotmail. From the article, 'The move is a shift for the Hotmail business, which in the past, has charged users who wanted to read their mail using desktop software, rather than a Web browser. Microsoft charged $20 and up for its paid service.'"

Re:I stopped using hotmail

[Stachybotris]

What is this discontinued plugin of which you speak? I can still check Hotmail via Outlook, and I'm using Office 2003.

gotmail does it

[rollx]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotmail [wikipedia.org]

You can use it with any mail client. Without any favor from Microsoft

Arrrgh!

[Anonymous Coward]

it's = it is
its = possessive

you're = you are
your = possessive

Windows Live Favorites Feature

[CyberSlugGump]

According to the table [com.com] (from clicking the image in the article), Windows Live Services will include "Windows Live Favorites" which is listed as having no competitors. Isn't del.icio.us [del.icio.us] a competitor?

Re:I stopped using hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Tough luck for you. Hotmail decided that some of us can still use Outlook to check our hotmail accounts without paying for the subscription fee.

Why I stopped using Hotmail

[liliafan]

I stopped using hotmail years back mostly because their spam situation was insane I could create I new hotmail account and without signing up for anything of giving the address out anywhere within a week the address would have started to recieve spam. Their filters were terrible.

Has this situation changed? Have they improved their filtering methods?

When I originally left hotmail I went to yahoo since their spam filters seemed a lot more powerful (you could teach it what you thought was spam) however then yahoo started to charge for their better filtering service and the spam situation there become unmanagable.

What is the opinion of my fellow /.er's which free mail service provides the best spam filtering? I am really only interested in the mainline providers, gmail, yahoo, hotmail.

My current email solution is to host my own mail server from my home, however, I would like to start using a freemail service since I can't access my home mail server from work due to an overly restrictive firewall/proxy policy.

Re:Better Solution

[De Lemming]

No, but if this is news then I must have madd haXX0rz skillz to be able to do this when it's not possible.

Besides your solution, I use Outlook Express (included in Windows) for years to access my Hotmail accounts. OE connects to Hotmail using some proprietary protocol, not POP3. It's a bit slow, but I like the abillity to have access to these accounts in the same place as my POP account. This is a free (gratis) solution and it's ad-free.

Re:Why I stopped using Hotmail

[PeterSomnium]

Try setting up a simple webmailprog. Like Ilohamail or something. That should work through a proxy.

Re:Better Solution

[Jim_Maryland]

I too use Outlook Express to access Hotmail (actually that's all I use Outlook Express for). I don't know if you remember, but at one point, they stopped allowing that access via Outlook Express unless you paid for a Hotmail account. Free accounts, since that cut-off, were only permitted to access using a web browser.

I've stopped using this account for the most part. The only reason I periodically check it now is that I've had it long enough that some long lost contacts from high school or college may still have that as the only way to locate me for a class reunion or possibly some former co-workers who may be of use for career networking.

Re:I stopped using hotmail

[CmdrPorno]

I've been using Outlook Express to check Hotmail for the past five years, and it still works today. I never paid an extra fee to be able to do this.

Re:Why I stopped using Hotmail

[meringuoid]

Hotmail's spam filtering has improved a lot in the last couple of years. It's had to; Hotmail has so very many users that every spammer in the world just tries a dictionary attack. [any word]@hotmail.com is likely to get delivered, and so it gets added to the list of fully double opt-in leads. Most spam gets correctly filtered from my Hotmail account, which has been promiscuously posted all over the net (including USENET) without bothering to mung it for the last eight years. There are a few false positives, though.

I've been using gmail for the last year or so, and I'm liking it so far. I carelessly posted with that address on USENET once or twice, thus getting onto some spam lists, but I've yet to see a spam reach my inbox, or a non-spam reach the junk folder. Google are, for some reason, very very good at correlating and indexing information... so it's not surprising they've become good at spam filtering as well :-)

Re:Why I stopped using Hotmail

[Azarael]

Hotmail has gotten a lot better in the last couple years, I still only use it for a spam catcher for sign ups and stuff. I still get a few spam emails a day(5-6), but more than half of them get filtered into my Junk folder. I know where you're coming from though, I used to get 20-30 spams a day and I wasn't too impressed with having to sort through my junk to find the real email that had gotten filtered out. But anyway, Gmail still way better as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Better Solution

[De Lemming]

Addition: according to this knowledge base article [microsoft.com], free access only works if you already accessed the Hotmail account using Outlook or Outlook Express before they switched to paid access. So you can't access an old account using OE for free if that account wasn't accessed throug OE before.

Re:I don't want it

[x2A]

I've had my account since around '96, when it was HoTMaiL... then MS bought it. During the process of "upgrading" accounts, my account got wiped (losing years old emails I'd had from friends, oooo I was pissed off with that), and then reset, back to 2meg. Thanks so much for that.

Just had a quick look at it, it's now 250meg, empty, and unused.

Gmail all the way.

no

[minus_273]

" From the article, "The move is a shift for the Hotmail business, which in the past, has charged users who wanted to read their mail using desktop software, rather than a Web browser. Microsoft charged $20 and up for its paid service."""

No, this needs clarification. The service where you access hotmail from outlook and outlook express is free if you were using it in the past before MS made it a paid service.

Re:gotmail does it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why link to Wikipedia, why not to the project's Sourceforge page [sourceforge.net]. I'm sure SF can handle it.

Re:Why I stopped using Hotmail

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

My current email solution is to host my own mail server from my home, however, I would like to start using a freemail service since I can't access my home mail server from work due to an overly restrictive firewall/proxy policy.

Depending upon what the firewall/proxy policy is, you might want to consider just setting up your e-mail server to serve webmail as well. There are free webmail solutions for quite a few mail servers. For some of the easiest, it is as simple as checking a box and making sure port 80 is open. I mention this because it is nice not to have to be at the mercy of a third party for you spam filtering needs.