Pop Goes Hotmail

As of March 2005, fans of MSN Hotmail will no longer be able to Access their e-mail via Outlook or Outlook Express, as Microsoft has announced they are reconfiguring Hotmail to help combat spam.
With Hotmail, an account holder can use what is known as Web DAV to download messages from Microsoft's server directlty into an e-mail client, thus saving the need to open a web browser to retrieve e-mail.
Under Hotmail's new policy, effective Monday, new users will only have the ability to use WEB DAV if they pay uncle Bill $19.95 per year, Hotmail currently has approximatley 185 million users.
Existing account holders will have until March 2005 to subscribe to the new service or be forced to browse to Hotmail's site to check their e-mail.
I don't know about you but it looks like one more reason to keep using Gmail, or even Yahoo.
A little known fact about Yahoo, if you set-up a e-mail account using a .ca extension instead of .com, you can have all mail routed through your favorite e-mail client via POP.
In Outlook Express go to tools then accounts and when you configure the new e-mail account enter the POP3 server as pop.mail.yahoo.ca and then enter smtp1.your-isp.com as the SMTP server, and OE will automatically download your mail from Yahoo's servers.