are we losing free MSN

[chuckles]

all my msn contacts have been forwarding this one :( hopefully this is a hoax. It would suck if it wasn't.

FW: Please Read THIS. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT

MSN is planning to take away MSN Messenger by January 1st, 2008. If you want to keep our MSN Messenger free of charge, send this email to everyone you know. It will be used as a petition. Each person you send this to counts as one signature. If this petition gets 500,000 signatures they will keep MSN Messenger. If they do not receive 500,000 votes you will have to pay $3.00 to have Messenger (per month). If you don't care about this then please for everyone's sake help out a little. Thank you for your time and consideration and please help MSN beat their vote PLEASE - Copy and paste this onto a new letter add you name below and send it to EVERYONE you know. I don't want to have to pay for it. Do you???????

[Mephiston]

I've seen similar messages before - a paid IM application simply wouldn't work. Would you pay for MSN? or just cut over to GTalk/ICQ/AIM/Yahoo/etc.

Generally speaking, if someone sends you something that looks like a forward they received, its generally not worth taking it seriously. If it contains a link to say, an official webpage in the microsoft.com domain? slightly diferent story ;)

[Reklaw]

This is indeed a very old hoax. It has been around for a long time - almost 6 years.
The answer to it is pretty obvious really. Would Micro$oft really charge for something that comes pre-installed on your O/S that already bombards you with advertising? Absolutely not. It's worth heaps more to them for you to use the product so they can get statistical info as well as imbed advertising that they can onsell. Messenger also links into Hotmail, and Micro$oft are desperate for people to use their client rather than Gmail, as they are getting a pasting at the moment.
Anyway, some links to the previous hoaxes for this:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/im.htm
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/msn-18-contacts.html

[scarlet-rain]

Yep, if I don't see the MSN logo next to the subject of an email claiming official MSN stuff, I generally ignore it. I mean, how can you take an email with multiple question marks in a row, spelling mistakes and no official MSN images or email layout seriously?

[MaDroX]

lol