MSN Hotmail to Freeloaders: Pay Up

Microsoft announced it would turn off POP3 e-mail retrieval from its free Hotmail service, effective July 16. The move is part of an aggressive push to sell MSN Extra Storage e-mail services.

by Ryan Naraine of internetnews.com [June 7, 2002]

"We are sorry to inform you that as of July 16, 2002, we will no longer be able to offer POP Mail Retrieval to our Hotmail users with a standard free account. This means that you will not be able to aggregate e-mail from various accounts into a single Hotmail account," Microsoft said in an e-mail to Hotmail users.

To continue using the POP3 feature, Microsoft said users must pony up $19.95 a year to access premium e-mail services. While basic Hotmail accounts remain free, premium subscribers get 10 MB of Hotmail storage, which is about five times what those who don't pay get. It would also allow Hotmail users to send and receive larger attachments—up to 1.5 MB per message—and up to 30 MB of MSN Communities storage, used primarily to store images on MSN's servers.

Subscribers also get an exemption from the account expiration policy, MSN said.

The Hotmail announcement mirrors a recent move my mega-portal Yahoo to turn off the free portion of its POP3 retrieval and e-mail forwarding services.

From April 24, free POP3 and Auto Mail Forwarding services for Yahoo subscribers went the premium route, continuing the recent trend among bigger Internet companies to convert freeloaders into paying customers.

Yahoo's price tag for the premium e-mail services is set at $29.99 and it allows Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, or other POP3 clients to manage Yahoo Mail and will also automatically forward mail to specified accounts. Yahoo's package also allows POP3 users to send larger attachments of up to 5MB. The former limit was 1.5MB.

Other paid sites from Lycos include Tripod, Angelfire, MatchMaker, and Lycos InSite.

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