Gosh, how embarassing to ask such a n00b question. But, I’m sick of having to go to Hotmail to check my various accounts with them. Can I set up T-Bird or Outlook Express to check my Hotmail accounts?
You can set up outlook , to check hotmail , I am not sure if T-bird supports it without a plugin.
In Outlook , when you set up a new account , look for the drop down box that would normally support POP or IMAP and look for HTML , then add your normal hotmail user name and password
Declan
You can only check it with Outlook if you have a pay account though, right?
I access hotmail through the web , so aside from experimenting with it several years ago , I could not tell ya if its a pay service now , or if your paying for the filters.
Declan
Okay , I just set up my hotmail account and no transaction pop ups appeared or links to the msn site that would hit me up for money
ah , this linky hotpopper suggests that you do have to pay for the service with non ms proggies
Declan
[ol][li]It’s easy to set up Outlook Express to work with Hotmail. I actually have a suspicion that that’s one of the purposes Microsoft bundles OE for free with every operating system. For specific instructions on how to do so, log in to your Hotmail account on the web, click on the Help link in the upper-right corner, and search for “Outlook Express.” No payment is needed. I don’t know how well it’ll work with multiple Hotmail accounts, though.[/li][li]On page 5 of Microsoft Outlook Version 2002 Inside Out, it mentions support for HTML-based email accounts such as Hotmail as a new feature, so from this we can infer that versions of Outlook earlier than 2002 (aka XP) don’t support Hotmail at all. I’ve set up Outlook XP with Hotmail myself, and they get along just fine, and there’s no payment or special account needed.[/li][li]According to Mozilla.org’s official support channels, Thunderbird does not support Hotmail. There are third-party plugins that allow this functionality, as Declan found, but they require a paid Hotmail account.[/li]Uh, have you thought about using Gmail instead? I have plenty of invites to give away, and Thunderbird works great with multiple Gmail accounts as well.[/ol]
After I click the help link, there’s a list of “Recent customer questions”. One of them is “Why can’t I access Outlook or Outlook Express from my free Hotmail account?”
which says:
Looks like payment is indeed needed.
Well, that’s odd. Even though I primarily use Thunderbird and Gmail, I still experiment with Outlook and Outlook Express on my free Hotmail account occasionally (as late as today!), and they work just fine. Maybe the words “new use” are significant, and people like myself who have had accounts for years are grandfathered.
This is indeed true. I received a notice for Hotmail Staff about 2 weeks ago saying that since I’m a long term user, I can continue to use Outlook (!!!??? Yeah, right) to access Hotmail.
Huh, I was a long time user, and I used it with Outlook, and it just stopped working for me when they stopped the free access. Maybe if I try again it’ll work!
Hey, it works! I guess my account was grandfathered in. I’m sure it stopped working before though, I guess having this active for older accounts is something they did some time after stopping it for all free accounts.
Getmail is another workaround. Forwards your Hotmail to another account e.g. your ISP account.