The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

This week, Microsoft began phasing out Hotmail access from Outlook, Entourage and Outlook Express.

While MSN Lead Product Manager Brooke Richardson assured users that due notice would be given before cutting off access and speculated that most users would still have access well into spring, my accounts are no longer accessible from Outlook Express and I received no notice from Microsoft about it. I'm not the only one.

The folks in Redmond made a big thing about how the system was being abused by spammers, but it's not obvious that such was the case. The way that I see it, by eliminating access via mail clients, MS is forcing customers to accept the burdens of Microsoft's awesomely bad web-interface and advertising and it is attempting to push more users to the floundering Hotmail pay-service which retains Outlook access.

While I never pretended that Hotmail gave me any real anonymity, I have kept two Hotmail accounts for convenience, handing out the addresses to companies that I knew would spam me or would sell my personal information to spammers. Because my private e-mail accounts were never exposed to such entities, I have managed to almost entirely eliminate spam from my "legitimate" e-mail accounts.

The only reason that I used Hotmail over Yahoo or Google or some other free e-mail service was that I could use my mail program -- Outlook Express under Mac OS 9 and Entourage under Mac OS X -- to check Hotmail as quickly and easily as I could check my POP e-mail accounts. Without that benefit, I'm shopping for a new free e-mail service.