Indrayana Rustandi wrote: > > To set things straight, let's just call this protocol > the proprietary Hotmail protocol, as opposed to the > HTTP mail protocol, which can be misleading. There are > open standards for email protocols even before Hotmail > existed, and yet Microsoft decided to design and use > its own protocol. You made it sound like implementing > this protocol is easy, but it's not. There's no open > specification. So the best way to do this is to > reverse-engineer Outlook Express, which supports this > protocol (that's what I heard). Obviously, there's no > source code available for Outlook Express in the > public domain, so we have to dig in into the binary > code.
Just like Samba did, and WINE is doing. Difficult, perhaps, but not impossible. > And exactly how do you propose to implement the > way to get around the "cat-and-mouse game" that you > mentioned? >... You don't need to. Microsoft can (and indeed, a few months ago, did) change Hotmail's Web site design, but that's irrelevant. They can't change the protocol itself, because if they did, people with existing Microsoft e-mail clients (Outlook Express, Entourage, etc) would no longer be able to check Hotmail accounts. Can you imagine the uproar if they did that? Especially if Microsoft had no excuse for asking such users to upgrade to the next version of Outlook Express, other than `well, we had to change the protocol so that Netscape users couldn't use it'? > Of course, you can still use your favorite > Web browser to check your Hotmail emails, >... Yes, but people want to use a dedicated mailer to check it instead because (even in Mozilla) it would be more usable to do that than to use the browser interface. -- Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing <http://mozilla.org/>
