Redmond, Washington — In an attempt to safeguard users of its mail services, software giant Microsoft over the weekend upgraded its webmail services by adding HTTPS support to secure connections when users are connecting to their Hotmail and Live Mail accounts.
Encrypting your documents is always a good idea especially when you dispatch sensitive information across the Internet, including account names, passwords or credit card data. Most email clients today support SSL and webmail services are going that route as well. Last week, Microsoft as well took necessary steps to boost the security of a tool that lets Outlook users send and receive messages through the company’s Web-based Hotmail service.
Microsoft has been providing an all-HTTPS option to Hotmail since last November, in part as a reaction to Firesheep, a Firefox add-on released the month earlier that let anyone scan an unsecured Wi-Fi network and hijack others’ access to Facebook, Twitter and a host of other services.
However, the latest Outlook Hotmail Connector was revised and now offers HTTPS support, a protocol that encrypts all communications between the email client and the Windows Live Hotmail service automatically. Besides, there is a new version of Windows Live Mail too that is now being equipped with SSL support by default as well. According to the company, moving forward more and more sites on live.com will be using SSL and, as long as SSL is enabled on a PC and other Internet devices (such as a smartphone), you will now be connecting to a site using this encryption technology.
“Using a connection with HTTPS empowers you to be even more confident that your account is safer from hijackers, and that your private information remains private,” the Outlook team wrote on its official blog Thursday.
Moreover, the new tool scrambles all information between Outlook and the Windows Live email, calendar and contacts services.
In fact, Google’s Gmail beat Hotmail to the HTTPS punch by years!
Interestingly, Gmail users have had the option of encrypting all Gmail communications since 2008, and there are ways to tell your browser to only use SSL connection for certain websites, but in mid-January 2010, Google enabled HTTPS by default on the same day it accused Chinese hackers of breaking into its systems and trying to access the Gmail accounts of human rights activists who live in the country.
Additionally, Microsoft has also revised its consumer-grade Windows Live Mail that now support HTTPS. Unlike its Outlook Express predecessor, which was packed with Windows XP, Windows Live Mail is an optional download for Vista and Windows 7.
Outlook Hotmail Connector can be downloaded in 32-bit and 64-bit versions for Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 on Windows. There is no similar tool for Outlook 2011, the email program included with Office for Mac 2011.
Furthermore, top email services such as Yahoo Mail and Gmail already support HTTPS connections. The Windows Live Essentials update — which includes the HTTPS-enabled Windows Live Mail — is also available on Microsoft’s download website.
Moving forward, some recent versions of the Chrome browser offer a more sophisticated, somewhat hidden, interface to configure SSL connections. Thus, if data is sent in the clear and without encryption, anyone with the ability to listen into a login session, for example when using POP3 or webmail, can easily retrieve usernames and passwords. HTTPS connections (versus HTTP connections) using secure socket layer (SSL) encrypt data and provide a reasonable protection from password theft.
However, an influential tech blog Ghacks reports that as a result of this recent Update for the Outlook Connector (version 14.0.6106.5001), the service is being widely complained about online for continually causing folder synchronization errors as described below. Users of the software are getting the message…
Task ‘-@-.com’ reported error (0×80004005) : ‘Network operation failed’
Task ‘-@-.com’ reported error (0x8004102A) : ‘Error with Send/Receive. There was an error synchronizing your folder hierarchy.The network connection is unavailable or interrupted. Please try again later.’
Task ‘-@-.com’ reported error (0x8004103A) : ‘Synchronization error.’
Nevertheless, the official Microsoft Answers support website has a thread related to the problem that people are subscribing to in ever greater numbers as the weekend goes on. Meanwhile, many users have reported that the problem is affecting their calendar, and that there is no way to fix it.
Hence, if you are experiencing this problem, the main thread for information on the Microsoft Answers website can be found here.