This was an interesting bit of news that travelled across my screen today. Microsoft has decided to drop support for the WebDAV protocol on its HotMail property.
Now this is an interesting (and entertaining) bit of news on several fronts. But first, the actual announcement bears some analysis.
Q: Why are we disabling DAV?
A: DAV is a legacy protocol that is not well suited for client access to large inboxes. Over time, as we’ve increased e-mail storage limits for Windows Live Hotmail customers—and now offer 5GB inboxes for free—a more efficient access protocol is needed.
Well the protocol is actually named WebDAV, but leaving that aside for the moment, the reasoning is quite funny. Microsoft’s enterprise mail service, Exchange, uses WebDAV as one of the various interfaces as well as IMAP, POP3, MAPI (Microsoft’s closed protocol) for providing access to mailboxes of all sizes. Now you have to remember that WebDAV is a web optimized protocol for accessing information and as such everything about performance in a messaging environment depends entirely on how you implement it. WebDAV is not a “legacy protocol”, in fact you will find that many other fine Microsoft products depend on it daily, like Exchange, like Sharepoint and is integrated in Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). For another amusing side track, please note that the Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol uses WebDAV in order to communicate with clients. Given that Exchange is Microsoft’s flagship enterprise email solution I have a hard time swallowing WebDAV as a legacy protocol. > Q: What are we replacing DAV with?
A: We have developed a new, much more efficient protocol called DeltaSynch that is far superior to DAV especially for large e-mail inboxes. It enables email clients to only download changes since the last time the client polled the email server for changes. This is much more efficient and high performing than having to download all the headers in every folder as is the case with DAV.
Good lord - does the world really really need yet another mail access protocol? Microsoft has their own proprietary protocol for optimized syncing between mobile devices and Exchange servers called ActiveSync (see previous points). You know, the one that Apple just licensed for use with the iPhone and people using Exchange server. Leaving aside the perfectly good protocol known as IMAP used for situations where you keep a mobile or desktop client synchronized with a copy of the mail that’s being held on a server.
On top of that Apple will be using Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol (over an http connection) in order to provide push mail in the same way that Windows Mobile phones use it to be immediately alerted of new messages from Exchange Servers. Oh and while we’re on the topic of push mail, the IMAP protocol has supported a push mode of operation for quite a while so if you have a modern IMAP client you can get free push mail from Yahoo’s free mail service today.
Q: Is DeltaSync compatible with Outlook Express?
A: The new protocol unfortunately is NOT supported by Outlook Express and support would require too many changes to the Outlook Express software.
Well of course - it’s a new protocol so why would any software be able to connect to it? Of course, we could have switched to a standard protocol like IMAP that does all of the same stuff and is already understood by Outlook Express, but that would be too easy and obvious. Of course, if you used a standard protocol then people would be able to switch to using any standard mail client like Thunderbird.
Q: Is there a different or new mail client I can try that uses DeltaSync?
A: Microsoft is providing Windows Live Mail, a free e-mail client that has the familiarity of Outlook Express and much more. This free, next generation e-mail client enables users to easily manage multiple e-mail accounts including Windows Live Hotmail and other e-mail accounts that support POP3/IMAP. Windows Live Mail also integrates well with other Windows Live services, is optimized to work with Windows Live Hotmail, and offers:
- Offline mail
- Windows Live Hotmail account aggregation for those users with multiple Hotmail accounts
- Account aggregation for POP and IMAP mail accounts
- Rich photo-sharing capabilities
- Advanced search via integration with Desktop Search
- Safety tools (Anti-Virus scanning, anti-phishing, anti-spam features across aggregated accounts for customers who do not have an Anti-Virus product)
- Integration with Windows Live services including Windows Live Messenger, Contacts and Spaces
- RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed aggregation
- Ability to send SMS (short message service) text to a mobile phone from Windows Live Mail
What? Switching email clients wasn’t on your list of things to do this year? Sorry, but we just love to waste your time so suck it up and switch to our new swiss army knife mail client that does exactly the same thing that your old one did with a couple of new features like integrated RSS (available in Outlook Express)
If there was ever a time to ditch using Hotmail as your primary mail account, this would be the opportunity. If you want a free online mail service, I would strongly suggest moving to GMail and setting up your account to use POP3 to grab all of your mail in Hotmail (which passes through a very efficient spam filter). Activate the IMAP option in GMail and you can keep using Outlook Express just fine.
Or you just might to consider switching to Apple’s new MobileMe service, touted as “Exchange for the rest of us”. It’s not free like GMail, but you get all of the fancy services that Microsoft sells to it’s big enterprise clients like push mail, contacts and calendars.
Oh - and you can keep Outlook Express.
Why Microsoft didn’t think of licensing their own ActiveSync protocol from themselves is beyond me.