Originally posted here by mohaughn
I think the more likely solution is that very few people who know about SMTP rely on free email services such as hotmail for their automated mailings. MS isn't going to spend much time on it because you don't pay them that much for the service, ie. nothing.

For item #2- most new AV products listen on port 25 and stop all outgoing emails. You can usually shut that off in the options for you AV. I know that McAfee 8.0i automatically stops all outbound port25 traffic.
1. I don't know if I would agree with you there. A quarter of all our students at our college has a hotmail account. MS is obviously having a lot of people using their services, plus it integrates with Passport and My MSN and calendar feature and everything else that comes with it... and if you pay a little extra you get even better features... if MS won't care, and people will stop getting their emails, it should be a concern. And obviously MS is telling me they will try to come up with a solution as soon as possible.

2. I have no idea how McAffe works, but I do know NAV does NOT block all outbound traffic on port 25. It monitors it for viruses. And it works just fine to leave it on for other email addresses. Like I said, just doesn't work with Hotmail for some strange reason...