You may already know about this recent Outlook Express change but if you don’t then it’s not too late to read about it.

If any of your end users come to you and complain that they can’t read their email then one of the questions you should ask them is if they are trying to access any of their Hotmail account(s) through Outlook Express. You should also check to see if any error messages are being generated when your end users try to access their email.

This year Microsoft changed their protocol that Hotmail was using – which was the Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) protocol – to a protocol called DeltaSync. The DAV protocol has been used for many years and Microsoft wanted to update their protocol stack to include the newer DeltaSync protocol which is better at supporting large email inboxes. DAV was the protocol that Outlook Express and a handful of older clients used to access Hotmail .The newer protocol, DeltaSync, enables email clients the ability to download only the changes that were made since the last synch operation. The DAV protocol instead would pull down everything.

Microsoft was pushing those users affected by this change to pull down Windows Live Mail as a replacement. The changeover was expected to have occurred on June 30th of 2008. But users and administrators got a break after complaining that they wouldn’t have time to make changes to their environment in time to prevent problems. The powers that be at Microsoft agreed and delayed the changeover for another year. This gave users enough time to plan for the migration. Lucky for them, that delay was supposed to expire on June 30th, 2009 but that cutoff date was also extended, this time to September 1st, 2009. The changeover effectively discontinued Hotmail support for Outlook Express.

Windows XP was the last time that Outlook Express was included in a Windows release. That release also included the ability to support a direct Hotmail connection. But Outlook Express users have the option to change their settings such that the POP3 email protocol is used. The POP3 protocol has been supported by Hotmail since March of 2009.

Windows Vista users can still use Windows Live Mail which uses the DeltaSync protocol to connect to their Hotmail accounts. And Windows 7 users have the option to install Windows Live Mail since Windows 7 does not default to any email clients.

Some of the advantages of using Windows Live Mail are that it supports POP3 and IMAP email protocols which I have written about in previous posts.

Microsoft could have chosen to add DeltaSync support to Outlook Express but decided not to do so. Of course, users of Hotmail can still access their mail through the web interface.

Prior to the protocol change your end user may have also received error messages about not being able to access their Hotmail email via Outlook or Outlook Express due to having free Hotmail accounts.  If you need to confirm that your Outlook Express email users do not have access to Hotmail then you can do so by trying to send and receive some email messages or trying to download Hotmail folders. You can expect to get an error message such as: Unknown Error. (Yes, it’s a lot of help isn’t it?)

Clicking on “Details” should produce the details of the error message. You should see something like:
- HTTPMAIL: 10:09:18 [rx]
- HTTP/1.1 402 Access to Hotmail via Outlook & Outlook Express now requires a subscription. Please sign up at http://join.msn.com/hotmailplus/overview

And if you are using Outlook Express with Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) then you will also see another error message that says:

- “Could not connect to Hotmail as username@hotmail.com.”

“Hotmail no longer allows email access via Outlook Express for free Hotmail/MSN accounts.”

If your end users were using Outlook Express then it was recommended that they switch to Windows Live Mail. If they were using Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 then it was recommended that they use the Office Outlook Connector. The Office Outlook Connector uses Microsoft’s new DeltaSync protocol.

As the administrator you might want to take a survey or at least review your end users configurations. If you have end users who are accessing their email with the browser based version of Hotmail then you will not have any problems – unless their email configuration settings are changed.