News for MSN Hotmail Users

If you currently use Outlook to check your MSN hotmail, you will soon have to pay for that privelege. Starting this week, that feature will not be available to new subscribers. Current users will have to move to paid service sometime in the next few months, and by April of next year, everyone will be paying for it. According to Microsoft, this isn’t being done to increase the paying numbers of Hotmail users, it is an effort to cut down on spam. Spammers are apparently abusing this feature. According to Brooke Richardson, lead product manager for MSN at Microsoft: “Essentially what spammers do is create scripts so they can rapid-fire e-mail from Outlook or Outlook Express and pop off a hundred e-mails from each of those Hotmail accounts in rapid succession,” Richardson says. “On certain days we have seen tens of thousands of Hotmail accounts set up and spamming in this matter.” Hmm. What do you think?