Shoutbox

How about creating an MS Passport (lets call it msgplusupdate@hotmail.com, for example).  MsgPlus! itself could then send a "Message" in the background to this passport account in a particular format at random intervals (as already discussed) which effectively asks if an update exists.

You could then have some software running on a server which would receive all such requests as a message, and if an update existed, it could send a URL in a message back to the user's version of MsgPlus! which it would interpret as a message to itself (for security reasons it would need to check the username, not just the contents of the message) and then fetch the file and initiate an update.

The URLs that are sent back could be any one of a number held in a DB which are mirror sites hosting the update file.  Indeed you could even have more than one MS Passport set up in this way, and MsgPlus! would randomly pick one to ask, reducing the message count to any one individually.

Be kind to me, its my first post here ever!

Dave Mager,
London, UK.