Thursday, February 12, 2009

Microsoft Live / Hotmail POP3

Some Good News: I just found out that Microsoft liberated Hotmail and its Live accounts to 3rd party applications. Now people in the US that have Hotmail or Live accounts can attach said accounts to applications like Mail (Mac) and Thunderbird (PC and Mac) which formerly were restricted access. This is tremendously overdue news... but welcome nevertheless. Finally, I can use Mail to manage all my e-mail inboxes. My mailboxe in Mail now looks like this:

That's a beautiful thing. You can see that I can check all of my e-mail accounts using only one application. This can also be accomplished using the free mail application Thunderbird. I'll post something soon about how to use Thunderbird to manage your mail. For those of you with multiple accounts, this will really help you save time and energy. (You can use Outlook for all this stuff too...)

The following information will help you in setting up your mailbox (especially the incoming and outgouing server information):
POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995) incoming server
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com or @live.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25) outgoing server
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

2 comments:

Natalie said...

I am very glad they decided to do this, especially because it will be more convenient for you. It sounds like they should have done it a while ago. Better late than never!

Derek said...

I didn't realize they're just making that available. I use Outlook for my gmail and a few other email accounts and it's awesome to use one thing for all of them.