[wideroots]

I believe Hotmail/Outlook.com is free. Sure, they make you to pay to remove those ads, but if you use AdBlock on Chrome or Firefox, you shouldn't see those ads. Plus, SkyDrive is so much better than Google Drive. I had too many document compatibility issues with Google Docs that I kinda gave up and joined SkyDrive. Staying with Microsoft with their cloud services has been pretty good for me so far.

[j45]

Sorry wideroots, I was referring to the late 90's early 2000's where Microsoft started charging for Hotmail "Pro".

If you didn't login every 90 days your free account would disappear. This was after Hotmail itself was built up to hundreds of millions of users with only free users.

At this time they were the main web email provider as well as Yahoo.

[Zenst]

Yes I remember that, was involved in a client scraper that would pull the email via webmail interface so could merge into a mobile device stream. Microsoft kept changing and tweaking there web interface just enough to make it a rather annoying battle to keep up with the cheapskate route.

Guess Google has hit saturation point and are now trying to leveridge some services as a package instead of just gaining income from ad's.

Still at least getting some notice, albiet timed rather interestingly right before the holiday season and also after the canges to there app accounts.

[Zenst]

I suppose you can get around this issue with a outlook account or another account that offers activesync for free or a cheaper price by having that account poll the gmail account via IMAP or the like. Also believe RIM device will not have an issue as they have a nice arsenal of webmail and other form of scrapers to centeralise your email push.

So in effect this realy will only effect the less-techy minded people out there with non android phones.

[cdcarter]

Well if you're polling the account by IMAP you might as well just...poll it by IMAP from the phone.