I can understand their reasoning behind it though, while it may stink for some users, Outlook can be a good spamming tool.

If you haven't seen it before, I would suggest checking out Hotmail Popper (http://www.fitsoftware.com), or there's probably another alternative out there as well. I've been using it to access my Hotmail account via Thunderbird for months now without any problems.

Just use MSN Explorer. No need to pay for it.

I must be privilaged as Hotmail is working fine for me from Outlook still...

I've not recieved any notice of it changing, and besides the comment here, I've seen nothing anywhere else about it. I guess I'll just keep using it and see if it dies, or if I can just avoid it stopping through guile and cunning

Well not even Thunderbird can access Hotmail. I tried it today. I emailed Hotmail staff to ask why this has changed. I also looked into Hotmail Popper to see if it could access Hotmail but I pulled this off the FAQ's from their site:

"Please Note: Microsoft has recently decided that only paying members will be able access Hotmail using outside services such as Hotmail Popper. Hotmail Popper will continue working with a "Hotmail Plus" (or equivalent MSN) account"
[Message Edited]

If you scour the 'net hard enough (trust me it's difficult) you can find the old 2.0.5 version of Hotmail Popper which was still free at that time. With version 3 they made you purchase it ($17.50), but even then it's relatively cheap.

If you need any help getting Hotmail Popper configured with either Thunderbird, Outlook or Outlook Express, feel free to drop me an email offline at mail@danwright.us and I can walk you through it.

This makes me happy and I hope that others, especially Yahoo follow suit and start charging for the email services. Curb some of the spam. The reason I say this is not that I don't already have measures in place to take care of it on my machine, but because there are folks out there, just as happens with phone solicitation, who rip off older folks, new to computers, that are really just using it to keep in touch with relatives and old friends. >

oh and for those willing to try this out (not sure if there are others out there) but there is this website called Affini.com and you can white list people into your mailbox and Afini takes out all the garbage that isn't on the list. You also can have people pay you to read their emails. An interesting concept:

http://www.affini.com

Fuzzy's logic touched the paranoid freak in me. If you purchase the premium version of Hotmail arent you telling the world that you got duped and therefore your a hot target for spam?

Reading the Hotmail help it says something to the effect of "new accounts won't support access through OE or Outlook", which fits with my experience as access to my account is still working through Outlook (I just checked again to be sure).

I can understand Hotmail taking this step as the junk filters at work have seen an increase of mail originating from @hotmail.com addresses recently so it was obviously being abused.

As for why I'm sticking with the hotmail account when I already have a very capable work based e-mail service, an ISP provided one, a g-mail account etc....I've tended to use the hotmail account to maintain a limited degree of anonymity when registering to access various web sites where I couldn't be confident of their policys of selling on details etc, and the password recovery services send the details to the address they were registered with. I also find a web based e-mail system is useful to access when out and about and you borrow someone elses machine for a quick e-mail send....and when I started using hotmail there wasn't a free alternative that was any good!

I've had my Hotmail account for over 5 years and indeed can't access it through Outlook 2003 nor OE.

On the other hand, my wife still can. Furthermore, she's been upgraded to 200 Megs (or so) while I'm still stuck with 2 Megs. I don't know how they select who gets an upgrade and who gets crippeled...