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On The Plus Side. Now that Microsoft have set a firm date for changing the way that people can access their e-mail accounts (trust me, this won't be the last change, they'll keep changing until they find a business model that extracts every last cent out of us) has there ever been a better time to move away from Windows Live Hotmail? Personally speaking I will
now be closing down my last 2 Hotmail accounts and I'll be using GetMail For Hotmail to help me. In the next 2 months I'll be replying to anybody who is still using my Hotmail accounts for contacting me and letting them know of my new details. GetMail for Hotmail will help with this because just by hitting reply on a forwarded message I'll be replying to the original message sender but replying from my new
contact details.
Recent Microsoft Policy Changes - The End Of WebDAV. I woke up this morning to be greeted by a nice message from my friends at Microsoft, at last the time has come for the WebDAV protocol (This is how GetMail accesses your Hotmail account) to be retired on the 30th of June 2008. To be fair to Microsoft they did try this once
before in 2004 but were met with such levels of complaint that they backed down, this doesn't look likely to happen this time. Instead of just removing WebDAV they have decided to replace one proprietary protocol with....yet another proprietary protocol, this time called DeltaSynch. Once again Microsoft shy away from using the
open protocols that are industry standard and invent their own creating a closed shop when it comes to people trying to access their e-mail.
I suppose what most people want to know is will you still going to be able to access your Hotmail other than from the web? In short yes, using Microsoft’s new e-mail client Windows Live Mail or Outlook you will be able to access your Hotmail/Windows Live Hotmail account. If you're looking to use anything else other than Microsoft’s mail clients then, err, it's tough
(unless you have a paid account because then you can use the POP3 protocol that Microsoft think is so inefficient they won't give it to their free users). So what about mail forwarding? GetMail for Hotmail WILL STILL WORK with all Hotmail/Windows Live Mail accounts after the change (you'll simply need to download FreePOPS as well). For those users
who currently rely on WebDAV access this will stop working. This change in policy from Microsoft will bring some changes to the program though and a new improved version will be released in the future. For more information on what I think of Microsoft's e-mail platform and the changes that are coming you can read this article that I've prepared,
I was going to title it "Microsoft Are A Bunch Of ******* - Just Let Us Access Our Mail In Peace", but thought better of it.
In The Press, I was recently interviewed for the "In Profile" section of a local business news paper and asked some fairly bog standard questions. The paper did a great job
of editing some of my more colourful responses but just in case anybody is interested it does give a little insight into what is going on inside my head! (By the way I'm not really that
orange in real life, I'm also far more attractive that than picture gives me credit for :) ).
GetMail For Hotmail v4.1 Is Now Available, this is a minor update the rolls up several of the bugs that were discovered with the new SMTP handling over the last 6 months. Far fewer messages should now break the forwarding process
for anybody using POP3 accounts (inlcuding those using FreePOPS, YPOPS etc). If you've previously donated or gone through the TrialPay process then you'll find the new version available from the donators area.
As part of this release I've also updated the GetMail FAQ.
New Year, New Land Mark Passed, I'm delighted to report that the total downloads for all my software has just passed the 3,000,000 mark! That's an average of 600,000 downloads
for each of the last 5 years (or just over 1600 a day). Not bad at all for somebody who only put his software on the web because the company he worked for went bust! The super star program during this time has of course
been GetMail for Hotmail which at its peek in early 2005 was getting downloaded 5,000 times a day. Looking forward to this next year I've got a few ideas for new programs that people will hopefully find useful and add to that success (fingers crossed)!
Merry Christmas everybody, well those of you that celebrate Christmas anyway! Not only is it Christmas but it's also nearly another year gone since I started the
e-eeasy.com website. Looking back it's actually 5 years since I started writing GetMail for Hotmail and 4 years since e-eeasy.com was born, how the time has flown by. This last year has probably been the most productive as well
with several major updates to GetMail (including the new Evolution variant) but also spanking new software in the shape of Adsense Alert, Holiday Friend, Excel Password Recovery
, Easy Shred File Shredder and most importantly (in my eyes anyway) ICU.
Some of this has flopped big time (I honestly thought more people would be interested in a free way of recovering lost Excel passwords) whilst others have outperformed beyond my wildest dreams (Adsense Alert being featured as software of the month on THE most popular
webmaster e-mail newsletter for one). Whilst GetMail continues to be incredibly popular (not to mention taking up most of my time) my big hope for 2008 is that the potential for ICU gets realised. It seems that almost every day you see a report about cyber stalking, bullying and grooming of young children on the
internet by sickos. With ICU every parent could have a very easy way of just keeping an eye on what their kids are up to online, hopefully with the old school press that is scheduled for early in the new year more parents will start to take advantage of what ICU offers.
So until the next update I'd just like to wish you and your family a happy and safe Christmas and all the best for the New Year.
GMail Introduces Free IMAP Access For All - This has to be one of the biggest announcements ever in the war between the big 3 free email providers.
The IMAP protocol is the way in which e-mail was supposed to be accessed, no more worrying about duplicate messages!
ICU Internet Monitoring Software - As with all the best software out there this has been written with one very specific goal in mind, to give me the ability
to see what my daughter has been using the computer for. Whilst the primary concern is internet use (especially social networking websites like Bebo) there are other things she may be doing offline that I'd prefer to
know about as well. Like GetMail I initially wrote this for myself but have been nagged into making it openly available, time will tell if this was a good thing to do or not. Having been available for a week my feelings are a
bit mixed at the moment, I'm really happy that so many people (literally hundreds in a week) are downloading the free version, I'm a little annoyed that so few are paying the few pounds for the full one. I'm getting that old Deja Vu feeling and if this grows much more
it's going to end up costing me money! Anyway, if you've got kids and want to find out what they're up to online/offline, you'll not find an easier or cheaper way of doing just that.
More Hotmail Forwarding Options Now Available - So after years of being nagged by people like me Microsoft has finally decided to build in some mail forwarding functionality to Windows Live Hotmail.
It will only allow you to forward to another Hotmail account but at least it's a start. With the new forwarding options available I thought I'd best do a summary of what options are available to you and perhaps
more importantly what option is best for you.
Hotmail Email Forwarding Service Now Available - This was something that I've been trying to put in place for a long time but because of where I am based the costs have always been prohibitive. I did give up on the idea for a
little while but I continued to get support requests for a "hosted forwarding service". Well I'm happy to announce that I've sourced a service that should suite everybody. For less that $5 a month you are looking at a service that can forward all
Hotmail accounts (Old and New non WebDAV), MSN accounts, Yahoo accounts and even AOL accounts. Nothing that impressive about that you may think? Well, the key here is the forwarding interval. Nobody wants to hang around waiting for their new messages, well this service will forward your new e-mail messages
every FIVE MINUTES, 24 HOURS A DAY! For my money that makes it by far and away the best service of this type available. You can find out more information and sign up here.
What's With TrialPay? - I want free software! I WANT FREE SOFTWARE! If you'll all just listen for 1 minute and let me explain. You're still getting free software. GetMail for Hotmail has and will always be free to the user,
however, I need to pay bills and support a family in a place with one of the highest costs of living on the planet! GetMail takes a lot of maintaining. I've teamed up with TrialPay to ensure that the software will stay free forever. The way it works is that you use
the TrialPay checkout, you then accept to try an offer from 1 of a HUGE number of big brand names. You get my software for free and I get paid an amount of money by the company you tried out. I've set the minimum payment so low that
there are lots of offers to try. Perhaps the simplest being to sign up with ebay and place a potentially non-winning bid on any item. That's all there is to it. You're still getting your free software and I'm getting something for making it available.
If you're worried about privacy then don't, TrialPay is being backed by some of the biggest names on the web, including some of the investors behind Google. If you're a writer of free software and want to get involved with TrialPay then you can sign up here.
The Lottery Generator gets a lick of paint - How the time whizzes by! Almost 4 years since I last updated the Lottery Generator software I've decided to give it a new lease of life. This of course has nothing to do with
me starting to play the lottery again and the fact that I want to use the software :-) It's once again a useful bit of software for those of you looking to generate some random numbers, I really can't over emphasise just how random it is, even I can't understand
where it plucks the numbers from! Here are some of the changes:-
- You can now pick the maximum number range
- All of the annoying typos are gone (fingers crossed)
- Email distribution working again, I have no idea how long it was broken!
To find out more please visit the Lottery Generator page.
Whilst I'm in the mood if anybody has any suggestions for updates to the old catalog of e-eeasy software then please feel free to drop me a line at support@e-eeasy.com The truth is if I'm not using the software myself then it tends to get ignored so don't be shy.
It's GetMail, just as you know it! - Closely following on the heels of the new GetMail variation (Evolution) I've released a new version of the original software. Version 4.0 is a major roll up of the
bug fixes that have taken place over the last 3 months and a major change to the SMTP handling. I'm hoping that once and for all this will solve the issues relating to time-outs when using GetMail with FreePOPS, certainly under testing I've been unable to make the
SMTP fail. As a reminder please remember that there are certain restrictions on the type of SMTP server that can be used:-
- Must allow relaying OR be the SMTP of the domain you wish to forward mail FROM
- Must NOT use POP before SMTP authentication
To find out more please visit the GetMail for Hotmail page.
And remember if you're looking for Hotmail forwarding without any original address changes, that can be ran as a service without logging in and that can be used from portable media then
GetMail Evolution is the way to go.
It's GetMail but not as you know it! - I've just released some new software, it's based on GetMail for Hotmail but with a whole new backend. Briefly, it features much more robust SMTP handling, forwarding of already read Hotmail messages and no changes to the addresss headers
of the orginal messages, can be used from a USB key drive plus a lot more. Basically I've stripped the program back and tried to make it more robust and easier to use.
In order to carry on I've had to charge for it (for people wanting to forward more than 5 messages a day anyway) but I've made it as cheap as I possible could. Please note that I'll also carry on developing the free GetMail for Hotmail software, I think there is plenty of room for both pieces of software.
If you are interested you can download the free trial (5 message daily limit) GetMail Evolution from Forward Hotmail.
Excel Password Recovery Released -
I've had a bit of a nightmare over the last couple of weeks, I managed to put a password on an Excel spreadsheet that I use to keep track of a version changes
without knowing it. Of course this meant that I then couldn't access the spreadsheet. I ended up paying out for some "Guaranteed Recovery Tools" that were nothing more than Excel VBA scripts that
ran a brute force attack on the spreadsheets. They tended to just hang after 20 minutes. In the end I decided to write my own dictionary style tool and give that a go, unfortunately as I must have hit random keys it didn't work BUT I thought that somebody might
get some use out of it. You can download the Excel Password Recovery tool by following the link.
Just in case anybody is interested I ended up using a service from Decryptum to unlock the workbook. What they do is actually remove the password completely, in about 5 minutes, you simply upload your locked version and then downlaod an unlocked version. It was well worth the $29 fee for me and they even offer
a free trial where they will show you part content of the file. If only I would have tried this before paying and downloading x number of dodgy VBA "solutions"!
New Help Videos Available In Donators Area -
I've added 2 videos to the donators area (complete with cheaping budgies and heavy breathing) that should help people who are really stuck. The first video details the
setting up of GetMail for those users with an old/paid for Hotmail account that still has WebDAV access. The second video shows you what to do if you get the dreaded "Outlook Access Has Been Disabled" error
and how to use GetMail with FreePOPS to get your mail moving. Both videos are in wmv format and are around 6MB and 14MB in size.
To find out a bit more and to make a donation please visit the donations page.
Happy New Year -
A belated Happy New Year to everybody out there! I'm working very hard on the new features for the much improved E-eeasy, look forward to better support, a new version of GetMail plus much more in the near future!
Windows Live Mail Update
I've finally had the opportunity to test GetMail with a Windows Live Mail enabled account, unfortunately I managed to activate the wrong account, fortunately this threw up
some interesting results. It appears as though GetMail for Hotmail WILL work with a Live Mail account if and only if the original account had WebDAV enabled. I've not had the chance to test based on a
new Hotmail (WebDAV disabled) account but my understanding is that GetMail will not work with this type of account. To be honest this surprises me a lot as it appears as though Microsoft have maintained some form of WebDAV access
for Live Mail accounts, new mail system, new technology would have been my preference. So in brief, if GetMail for Hotmail currently works with your Hotmail account and you have the chance to upgrade to live mail then
GetMail should carry on working, if it doesn't it wont.
If GetMail doesn't work "as is" with your mail account remember that by combining GetMail with FreePOPS you should be able to forward on from almost any account.
GetMail under Linux?
I recently received this e-mail, i've not had the chance to test it but it might be worth a try for any of you free OS lovers out there:-
Hello,
I don't need support, I want to tell you you're a good programmer.
I have just downloaded GetMail v3.2 on a Linux machine. I am currently running GetMail in WINE. This is the first useful program designed for Windows that has ever run without fiddling. Thank you for not using strange APIs.
From Stanley
IMPORTANT - PLEASE READ
Check out this article
Microsoft was going to discontinue its free access to the protocol GetMail utilises for its Hotmail/MSN access. What this meant is that
sometime around April 2005 GetMail would stop working with Hotmail/MSN accounts that have had their WebDAV disabled. However, they appear to have gone back on their
original decision to a degree, no new accounts have WebDAV enabled but some old accounts have been allowed to keep it. The only real way of checking if GetMail will work for you is to try it and see. If you get the "Your Outlook access has been disabled" error
message then you've been cut off. In this case i'd recommend a program called FreePOPs which you can either use on its own or with GetMail depending on what you want to do.
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