Using Hotmail in Mozilla Thunderbird?

Factual Questions
1

Using Thunderbird 1.5 and found an extension called Webmail that is supposed to let you use an existing hotmail email account to send and receive mail within TB.

I downloaded and installed the Webmail extension. However, everything still looks the same, and don’t see any way to get to and/or use Hotmail.

Am I missing something obvious? I did try to Add A New Account, gave it my Hotmail name, but only could guess at the Server settings or the SMTP settings. Tried a few, but none of them would let me get incoming hotmail or send as though from hotmail.

Any suggestions?

2

AFAIK, only the pay versions of hotmail will work correctly with Thunderbird and OE, unless Webmail is supposed to be a way to work around this somehow.

3

Just tried it on Hotmail and worked just fine. After re-starting TBird I went to <Tools><Account Settings…>. Clicked on “Add Account…” button and selected “Web Mail” option. Set server settings as suggested here and it worked straight off.

4

P.S. I don’t have a pay account - just the regular freebie.

5

Thanks, Ticker. I tried this, and it worked just fine sending mail out, but would not get incoming hotmail mail.

Got a message: “Sending of username did not succeed. Mail server localhost responded: hotmail.com is a unsupported domain.”

I went to Account Setting and SMTP and tried to Add Account using “localhost” there too, but it did not work. Wonder if should change the port number?

Well, half-way there.

6

I still think that your problem stems from using a free hotmail account with Thunderbird. From the Thunderbird FAQ:

From Microsoft’s site regarding using a Hotmail account with Outlook Express:

I’m sure that Microsoft has also made sure that free accounts don’t work correctly with Thunderbird. Gmail works fine with both OE and Thunderbird.

7

Hotmail works fine with Thunderbird for me, but I’ve had it set up for so long, I can’t remember what i did to set it up. I have a free hotmail account.

8

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I seem to have two Webmail extensions, one called “Webmail” and one called “Webmail - Hotmail”

9

localhost goes in the “Server settings” of the Hotmail account, and the user name must include the domain e.g. username@hotmail.com

Presumably you’ve also got the Hotmail addon, which is required as well as the Webmail extension itself.

10

I believe that some people may be reading this thread to gain insights into this problem for clients other than Thunderbird. For these people, I would like to suggest a program called Hotmail Popper (formerly from Boolean Software (Boolean.ca), but now from Custom Fit Software (www.fitsoftware.com). It isn’t free, but it is a one-time purchase that has allowed me to check my freemail hotmail account via POP for something like eight years now.

Though I am a great supporter of the Mozilla project or many years (I’ve even submitted a fix or two), Thunderbird does not yet meet all my needs (partly because of procedures I wrote into projects and sites I’ve run since well before Thunderbird existed). We can’t always tailor our need to our politics – I tried, but I fully expected (in the radically different web universe of eight years ago) that the project that eventually became Thunderbird would incorporate certain features by now. That small one-time fee paid to a small software company felt much better (at the time) than regular ongoing payments to Microsoft, and it has served me well.

I can’t guess what the future will bring, especially with the new mail service MS is trying to supplant Hotmail with. I do believe Thunderbird will come up with a plug-in (if it hasn’t already) to perform the same function as Hotmail popper (but as I said, I’ve guessed wrong with them before). I just wanted to report my experience with this one program for the benefit of people who need their Hotmail to be reliable under POP. In recent years, MS seemed to change Hotmail in a way that “broke” Hotmail Popper (and other solutions) 1-3x a year, and it was nice to know that I could count on a Hotmail Popper update to fix it again in short order. FOSS (Free or Open Source Software) is fantastic, but in this one area, it’s fallen short IME, and even the most radical FOSS projects and advocates must acknowledge that paid support and management services are valid and valuable (Most viable FOSS companies offer paid support or management for free “*nix” OS and software. One must to meet the payroll somehow, after all)

11

That’s what this thread is discussing. It has had an extension for some time - Webmail - which works, is free, can handle a variety of web-based systems, and is updated when necessary.

12

Yup, that’s what I did. What about the “Use Secure Settings?” I’ve tried all of them with same frustrating results.

I noticed today that my email name did accidentally start with an upper case letter, so changed that. A little progress getting mail, as the next thing that came up was a box asking for my Hotmail password. Put that in, and got the same old error message afterward.

All this is probably not worth the trouble, but now I’m challenged to get the damn thing working, but have hit a brick wall at this point, no idea what else to do.

Somewhere saw it suggested that in some cases it needed a Port number higher than 1024 or something, so tried a few random high numbers, still no difference.

I suspect I’m missing some very simple setting, but comparing them with my other two account settings, can’t see what.

Yes indeedy, first thing I did.