Have Microsoft-hosted email? Love using Live Mail 2012? Bad news Microsoft says users who access their Outlook.com addresses with Windows Live Mail 2012 will soon be cut off from sending and receiving mail. Redmond said in a notice to customers that as of late next month (the exact day was not given), accounts hosted on the outlook.com will no longer be able to sync with Live Mail 2012. …
What is actually changing? The MS web page does not say what these "modern synchronization technologies" are that are needed. POP or IMAP, are they really modern?
Or are they the ones being deleted to force poor outlook users in to a web interface to spam you with adverts more effectively?
All this is guessing, nevertheless...
The protocols might be WebDAV and DeltaSync which were only ever used by Windows Live Mail and Hotmail together. Given that MS say you should switch over to Outlook-the-client, those two protocols are probably going to dropped and ActiveSync used in its place.
However MS would be mad to drop POP3 and IMAP from Hotmail so other clients apart from Outlook-the-client would carry on working, except for WLM which sees a @hotmail.com or @outlook.com address and automatically configures itself for a nonexistent protocol. Perhaps there's some way to trick it into configuring manually for IMAP.
I've deliberately used Hotmail instead of Outlook.com to make it clearer, otherwise everything would be called Outlook.
"However MS would be mad to drop POP3 and IMAP from Hotmail so other clients apart from Outlook-the-client would carry on working, except for WLM which sees a @hotmail.com or @outlook.com address and automatically configures itself for a nonexistent protocol. Perhaps there's some way to trick it into configuring manually for IMAP."
I certainly hope you're right about this, because if Thunderbird stops being able to read my MSN e-mail (which I've had since MSN was in beta, and I continue to pay $5/month for the e-mail along with 'just in case' dial-in access which I've used on occasion, most recently LAST YEAR), then I'm *DUMPING* my MSN account and e-mail address and anything ELSE that has to do with outlook, hotmail, msn mail, or anything SIMILAR.
I'm not going to use their Win-10-nic mail client. I tested that one a year ago during the insider program, and it tried to screw up my IMAP folders. Fortunately it did no real damage. It's also 2D FLUGLY. And it doesn't run in Linux.
Probably it is something like that. MS wants to monetize everything... OS-as-a-ervice, apps (programs)-as-a-service, ads-to-your-desktop-as-a-service. So why not email? They are definitely circling the wagons and killing anything they can't turn into a revenue stream.
To be fair, everyone is circling the wagons. That's where we are in the current tech bubble.
Unfortunately for Google, their abundent free doo-dads was the only thing distracting me from noticing that Goo...Alphabet is actually a pretty nasty piece of work.
Ok government regulators ... get em!
Guess you can still configure Live Mail to get mails via IMAP and send via SMTP using hotmail/outlook.com, but it won't work for calendars and address books.
Another good example of how "cloud" services can cut you out if you don't upgrade as they like.
"modern synchronization technologies" .. my ass... the same did google and discontinued EAS and Sync (SyncML). I bet sooner or later they are going to discontinue IMAP/POP and force email users to use proprietary s/ware like outlook.
I jumped the boat of using gmail/outlook/yahoo etc directly, I m using my own email (domain) (just email hosting) and everything from gmail/outlook/yahoo is being forwarded to my domain, i recently found a cheap hosting and installed horde, now I have even SyncML with contacts/calendar.
Try giving people a better alternative and they may choose to move across, rather than the now far too common and frankly boring bully-boy tactics that M$ seem to use for everything. As a hint MS, this is is why people are leaving and moving to other vendors platforms.
And for those affected, simple, either dump Windows or take your mail out of office365 (or do both) and go with another mail provider. Its only POP, SMTP and IMAP after all.
I was wondering what the numbers look like across those "devices".
How many XBox Ones? PC/laptops? Surfaces? Winphones? (OK, forget that one) :)
How many of those "devices" are actually VMs? How many of those "devices" are still sitting in retail?
Without a breakdown of the numbers, the imagination runs riot.
well, slightly OT (but it WAS in the article), net stats (like statcounter) seem to indicate that it might be relatively accurate at 300 million. What they're NOT saying is that it's about 1/3 of their customer base using either 8, 8.1, or 10. The rest of us are on 7, Vista, XP, or maybe something else. And that's just based on "who hits the internet" and with Micro-shaft spyware running, I have to wonder how much of that 'traffic' was generated by the spyware...
So if 2/3 of the customer base REFUSE to downupgrade to Win-10-nic, even when it's FREE, they should be paying a LOT of attention to that. But they're not.
I was more worried about the blatant Reg sell-out for Windows 10 that seems to have occurred today.
Honestly, are we sponsored by MS now or what? There's ZERO need for that mention in the article, even as a postscript, when there are plenty of Windows 10 articles on the front-page already mentioning it.
It's like a few years ago when everything was suddenly Apple-praising.
Stop it Reg, you're better than that.
I have a gmail account that I use for redundancy. Mail sent through my web sites goes to my domain mail with a copy to gmail just to make sure I lose out on a lead. It's also a backup in case my host curls up and dies or goes down.
I've never liked M$'s service or mail programs. Too many security holes, spam and hurdles. It also looks cheesy if you use a Hotmail, Outlook or MSN mail address for business.
Get your own domain name and host. It's cheap these days and you can develop yourself as a brand for all that you do. You also get a bucket full of email address, web space, FTP space and NO ADs all for the price of one Starbucks Vente Latte a month.
It came from Outlook Express and in a world where many email clients are close to abandonware it's not at all bad - it's main fault is actually the proprietary stuff that let it talk to Exchange, though I suspect that was a deliberate attempt to migrate users away from POP/IMAP which clearly lacked success.
It came from Outlook Express...
So this would have been a Windows (h)8 exclusive then? No wonder this pass right by me... It must have been what late 2000, and Windows98SE since I had last used Outlook Express. If I recall correctly MicroSoft done chucked out the old Outlook Express with Windows XP, or was it 7? All I can seem to recall was it not being there on latter OS's, so I never used it.
Oddly enough, looking back I did actually enjoy using it on Win98SE, and had found it to have been better (for me...), then the full fat Office98 version. Which felt well fat. Perhaps I was just younger, and hadn't caught on to this whole Calendar thing. Which so warp's my world now. Still as they say you can't take it (i.e. The PC), with you. An Android Phablet on the other hand. So...
Microsoft removed OE in Vista, which came with Windows Mail instead. OE worked well enough as a simple mail client, but was marred by many security bugs.
Later it decided not to bundle a mail application anymore with the OS, and instead release it as a separate application in the Windows Live product line. Now Windows LIve apps themselves look dead.
With 8 and 10 Microsoft again changed its mind, and both come with a mail "app". Just the modern UI app for Windows 8 is nice in tablet mode on a small screen only, and the UWP one in 10 is another attempt again.
Its another proof MS doesn't know what it's doing, and like a fly bumps here and there looking for a way to exit - meanwhile crippling 7 users as much as it can trying to switch them to 10.
Okay, I know this is STUPIDLY late for a reply but there is on important point to make, which is that the mail 'app' for Windows 8 requires you to link your computer's Windows login with a 'Live' account.
In fact you can't even use the CALENDAR (a separate 'app') without doing this. I might want to just have a calendar on my PC for simple personal stuff that isn't linked or sync'ed to anything. But no, you can't do that unless your whole PC and OS is linked to an MS account.
It's a small thing for most people but I deeply resent the suggestion that previously-available functionality should now require me to be signed up with the OS vendor.
You can't make it up. In plain English: our own outlook.com won't work with our own mail client, so please, please, PLEASE go and open an e-mail account with Gmail and Yahoo Mail addresses if you STILL want to plod on with our totally fucked up Windows Live Mail. Thank you for your continuing support.
p.s. and I know it's royally fucked up, because over the last few months a trickle of (minor) issues with Windows LiveMail has turned into a shitstorm of annoying issues.
So... I guess if I can't find motivation to move away from 20 years of free e-mail (hotmail) and nearly 20 years of free MS e-mail client, the good old MS have now taken upon themselves to extend a gentle supportive kick in the ass. Well, fuck you too.
Presumably the whole point of killing LiveMail is so that they can push ads at people.
The average inbox is full of ads anyway, but of course those are not making money for Micro$oft.
My aunt's email provider (BT) has regularly reorganised their webmail page to make more space for ads. when you are nearly 90, not being able to figure out where to click on screen is a BIG problem, and as her de-facto tech support, I had to take the flak. I gave up on webmail and installed an IMAP client, and she is happy again, because the interface is the same as it was yesterday AND there are no confusing ads taking up half the screen trying to sell her stuff she would never dream of buying (or worse, pushing malware). I am sure that most of us have relatives in the same boat. I bet few of us would willingly use a webmail interface.
I occasionally enter the webmail view of Hotmail, where I have had an account for many years. When I do, I think "OMG! It's horrible!" and get out ASAP.
So, which interface is next to go? My money's on the Hotmail plugin for Outlook, which is currently depriving them of many millions of ad pushes per day.
How long until they kill off IMAP, POP3?
Surly those Visigoths on Android using of all things GMail, to check their Hotmail.com Posts, must surly be depriving MicroSoft of all those wonderful Eyeballs with which to see all those (In their world), wonderful Ads....
"More tired old MS bashing (yawn). Go back to 98, where you're obviously much happier."
However, in this case it is a deserved bashing because Microsoft is quite clearly trying to move people away from Live Mail 2012 by degrading and crippling that product so that they will move to a newer paid-for app in Microsoft's app store.
The good news is that there are plenty of free alternatives to Live Mail 2012 out there that can work with Windows 10.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
