A bad news for those who access their Hotmail accounts using Microsoft’s Outlook Express.  Microsoft is planning to disable the Distributed Authoring and Versioning Protocol (DAV) which is required to access Hotmail using Outlook Express.  The change is expected to happen by June 30, 2008.

This move looks more of a push from Microsoft for getting users onto its Window Live Mail service than the reason stated by Microsoft.  According to Microsoft,

DAV is a legacy protocol that is not well suited for client access to large inboxes. Over time, as we’ve increased email storage limits for Hotmail customers and now offer 5GB inboxes for free, a more efficient access protocol is needed.

The new protocol developed for large email accounts, DeltaSynch, is not supported by Outlook Express.  DeltaSynch only downloads the latest changes from the email server to the client which makes it more faster.  It also allows for easier integration and management of multiple email accounts including the POP3/IMAP accounts.

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