I am sorry but it sounds like bullshit to me. It sounds like one of those typical 'we are gonna charge you from now, because for your personal safety it costs us money to protect your personal privacy'.

I take it hotmail has a lot of fancy filters to stop spam being received (still doesn't work too good). Hotmail also prohibits users from sending emails to more than say 50 users at a time (also helps to lower spam being sent). Ok cool.

So the problem here is that using hotmail with Outlook or Entourage allows you to send an email to a spammable number of recipients, and on top of that you can send it from an email address that may or may not be real.

Okay -- so -- how-about microsoft limits the number of possible recipients (yeah I know that sucks if you have a fan-club), or how about they require authentication at the time of sending the email to check and see if the 'reply-to-sender' email address you are using is in fact your valid and real email address. Isn't that the real fix.

Gees, no, .. for some reason I guess that surpasses the talent and money of the world's wealthiest software giant.

Perhaps they should just charge clients to hook up hotmail with entourage or outlook. gees that will work, cause spamming is like delivering flyers through your mail box (some malicious) .. a real spammer, will just pay the nominal fee for such a great method of advertising, distribution and sometimes malicious harm to others (the virus). And the rest of us .. well .. we can just go back to hotmail webmail and watch banner adverts and be constrained by limits of webspace on our accounts.

--> I am not prone to knocking microsoft, and don't even use hotmail personally, but to me this just really sounds like bullshit. Their just following the Yahoo! mail model where you can either pay to receive your mail on your desktop, or you receive Yahoo! advertising along with your mail (that is by the way legal spam that you sign up to).

Gees -- For your own personal safety we have to charge you -- that is the real deal.

You got that right. And today's Joy of Tech cartoon (http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/index.html) says it all.

gmail

Does gMail support Pop clients to download your email for free?

I'm not really sure what all the fuss over gmail is. Its just email with a lot of space. Big f'ing deal. By all the "GMAIL IS GOD" talk, you'd think it somehow actually sent you hookers when you used it or something.

And gmail is great if you want your mail to include ads when you send it out/read it. And if you can get it (guess what, its still not available to the masses - or at least to us 'losers' who don't know anyone to get us an address.)

Their just following the Yahoo! mail model where you can either pay to receive your mail on your desktop, or you receive Yahoo! advertising along with your mail (that is by the way legal spam that you sign up to).
And I was surprised that Hotmail even had this support. Most of these free services are free because they're getting paid through the ads. They're not there to just use from external sources. Otherwise, where's the benefit to the provider? Oh, let me guess, the same it was for .Mac. All that free advertising that would have driven Apple to the top of the computer world if it were still free...

Oh, and as for this:
Okay -- so -- how-about microsoft limits the number of possible recipients (yeah I know that sucks if you have a fan-club), or how about they require authentication at the time of sending the email to check and see if the 'reply-to-sender' email address you are using is in fact your valid and real email address. Isn't that the real fix.

Um, the problem wasn't the reply-to-sender was invalid. What would it matter. You sign up for a bogus hotmail account, just use that as your reply-to address. Problem solved. And they can change emails faster than Hotmail can close them down.

And limiting number of recipients isn't a big deal, because you just script the software to send out the mails one at a time, or in blocks of 50 or 100 or whatever the limit is.

Any other great spam-fighting ideas?

"Does gMail support Pop clients to download your email for free? "
As of recently, yes.

"And limiting number of recipients isn't a big deal, because you just script the software to send out the mails one at a time, or in blocks of 50 or 100 or whatever the limit is. "
So limit the number of emails to a lilmited number of recipients then. 50 emails per hour max to ten recipients each max. And only allow 2 concurrent HTTP connections from a given IP address and only 5 distinct logins per hour from a given IP address. They're in control of the servers, they can do pretty much whatever they like. It's relatively straightforward to 'throttle' someone's webmail account if you want to. But it would cost them money to develop and administer. As oppose to forcing people to use paid for accounts, which MAKES them money. MS is a commercial organisation, not a charity. So they lose some users along the way, those users weren't generating much income anyway. It's not a hard decision for a profit making company to make. Nor really do I think they deserve villifying for it to be honest. In the same situation, Sun or Oracle or Apple would probably make the same decision.

"Does gMail support Pop clients to download your email for free? "

Yes.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041110192454841

Try to follow along now.

Sheesh, for someone so disconnected (no friends with Gmail invites?) you sure have a holier-than-thou attitude.

I don't understand why developers don't add a feature to e-mail servers that limits the sending based on x message per x time. Also add the feature to routers on Port 25 so ISPs block spamers. Including Backbone ISPs.

Oh well nice though, its too late for that. There is a whole indrusity built around fighting spam and I don't think they want that.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041110192454841

Try to follow along now.

Sheesh, for someone so disconnected (no friends with Gmail invites?) you sure have a holier-than-thou attitude.

Hey, it was a simple question, not some slam about it not supporting. I don't have a gmail account, so how exactly would I know?

And, sorry, I guess my friends aren't the type stuck to their computers 100 hours a week where the thought of getting a gmail account is enough to wet their pants in excitement (yes, now that's a holier than though attitude-but, then again, the current gmail users seem to act like "I'm one of the chosen, so kneel before me!", so its all even).

Gmail's POP3 plays nice (and secure) with Entourage 2004. So long hotmail, Micro$oft made the decision process elegantly simple!
--
http://homepage.mac.com/johnhood

I paid for the latest version of office, and it wasn't that cheap, including Virtual PC. So as far as I'm concerned - you jerks got my money already. One of the reasons I bought office was for the use of Entourage, now you friggin break Entourage's access to your own free email service? What kind of customer support is this?

Greedy b*******...

umijin