14 DAY TRIAL // Come September 1st, 2009, Microsoft will finally kill off a legacy communications protocol that has long bridged the company’s online email service and its email clients for both Windows and Mac OS. At the start of next month, the Redmond company will retire the Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) for Outlook, Outlook Express, and Entourage. DAV was used by the software giant’s email clients to grab content from Hotmail and make it accessible to end users locally, on their computers. The Redmond company has warned since 2008 that it was planning to kill DAV, and it has since then offered end users alternatives to link Windows Live Hotmail with Microsoft email clients.
“Outlook, Outlook Express, and Entourage use a legacy communications method (known as the DAV protocol) to access Hotmail. Because the DAV protocol is not optimally suited for programs to access large inboxes such as Hotmail which now provides users ever-growing storage*, new alternatives have been built. Last year, customers asked us to postpone plans to retire the DAV protocol until more options were available. Now that these options (including the POP3 protocol) are available, we are ready to retire the DAV protocol,” revealed a member of the Windows Live Team.
Back in mid-January 2009, Microsoft started rolling out POP3 support for Windows Live Hotmail. POP3 is considered a protocol superior to DAV, but inferior to IMAP. However, for the time being, users with free Windows Live Hotmail accounts will need to rely on POP3, as Microsoft does not yet support IMAP, nor has it revealed plans to support the protocol moving forward. By mid-March 2009, the Redmond company was done with the Windows Live Hotmail POP3 support rollout process, and the protocol has since then been available to users worldwide.
“If you use Microsoft Office Outlook to view Hotmail, you can download free Office Outlook Connector to continue accessing your Windows Live Hotmail within Outlook 2003 or 2007. If you're using Outlook 2002, you will need to change the settings on your program to access your Hotmail. Click here to learn more. If you use Outlook Express to view Hotmail, you can choose to download free Windows Live Mail (recommended) or change the settings on your program to access your Hotmail within Outlook Express. Click here to learn more about your options. If you use Entourage to view Hotmail, you can change the settings in your program to view your e-mail. Click here to learn more,” the Windows Live Hotmail team representative added.