14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is currently cooking the complete integration of its Outlook and Windows Live Mail desktop email clients, as well as Eudora, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, with the Windows Live Hotmail online service. Although the Redmond company is already offering rich synchronization in Outlook with the Outlook Connector and through Windows Live Mail, end users indicated a preference for Post Office Protocol. Essentially, POP is the protocol that allows a desktop client to connect to an email server and download emails directly to a machine. Despite the fact that Microsoft has integrated a rich synchronization protocol dubbed DeltaSync in Outlook and Windows Live Mail, it is also looking to generalize the use of POP.
Omar Shahine, the Lead Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail, informed that the company has decided to expand the very limited POP service in Hotmail to all premium users. "The story of POP continues like this? A few months ago some folks on the team hatched a plan to finally offer POP and starting this week Hotmail Plus users ($19.95 a year) will be able to use POP access from any device. In the interest of transparency though I want to be clear that we have plans to offer POP to all users (all premium and free) but we aren't ready to do that yet. If you do take advantage of this premium feature and sign up for Hotmail plus you'll also get an ad-free experience, more storage, larger attachment support, and a non expiring account," Shahine stated.
The reason why the Hotmail POP service has been kept extremely limited is that Microsoft wanted to push the adoption of DeltaSync. However, the DeltaSync protocol has the downside that it is limited to Outlook and Windows Live Mail. In this regard, Microsoft has focused on additional desktop email clients such as Eudora, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, delivering connectivity with Hotmail. Currently, only Hotmail Plus users will get POP. Standard Windows Live Hotmail and MSN Premium users will not receive POP access at this time. But Shahine promised that in the next year, all Hotmail users will be able to integrate their desktop email clients via POP with Windows Live Hotmail.
"What we didn't want to do is offer POP access and then have Outlook and Windows Live Mail customers use POP over DeltaSync. Now that we have free offline mail access we have focused our energies on offering users who use clients like Eudora, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail the ability to get their Hotmail in those clients. Additionally, most all mobile devices today support POP (including the Apple iPhone) and to date we haven't been able to offer folks with a data plan a rich way to get their email unless they are using Windows Mobile (and even that is limited depending on carrier)", Shahine added.