Hotmail users will now have to pay a yearly subscription fee for using the Outlook e-mail program to access their messages.

If you use Outlook to pick up your Hotmail messages you will have to pay $19.95 (£11) for an annual subscription to Hotmail Plus or the $99.95 (£55) a year for MSN Premium. But if you are already using the technology to download your messages you will be able to carry on using the service for free until April.

Microsoft made this hard decision about charging for the service, in a bid to curb the menace of spammers. The change comes into effect 27th September and will be applicable to all users worldwide by 2005 after extensive communication informs to all existing users.

Millions of Hotmail users are going to be affected. One estimate points at 187 million active accounts currently on this popular web-based e-mail service. In the past, people simply downloaded their messages using the Web DAV (Web distributed authoring and versioning) technology. One could download e-mail from Hotmail into Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. With the new MS policy, however only those who have paid an annual subscription fee will be able to access their messages without opening a browser window.

The problem of spammers was getting out of hand. MSN observed an increasing number of spammers exploiting the system to send unwanted messages to the overall e-mail community, which included a large percentage of Hotmail customers.

The magnitude of the problem compelled MSN to make this protocol (and therefore Outlook/Outlook Express functionality for Hotmail) a subscription-only feature.

Other steps have also been taken to prevent spammers using Hotmail: On free accounts the company has placed a limit of 100 outgoing messages per day and introduced extra validation requirements when opening a new account.

It is hoped that making it a ‘subscription-only’ feature would dissuade spammers besides helping to track them down. Tracing their whereabouts becomes possible if the company has a record of credit cards, bank account number, etc. of the user.

With this change in policy Hotmail now joins other e-mail services such as Yahoo and America Online who also limit access to mail exporting tools to paid subscribers.

It's still free to login through their website to check for mail.
And what can you expect from Microsoft? they're so poor they need the extra cash well, with all of their fines, this might be true

Lucky for me I use gmail!

Looks like I'll start using the e-mail accounts that came with my web hosting service.