The Scrolls

Did you know?

I just thought I’d make a neighbourhood PSA (that’s public service announcement for those of you not “in the know”) that you no longer need any workarounds to access Hotmail e-mail from the client of your choice. For a long time I’d been using Hotmail Popper (free free version), until Hotmail recently changed how things work and it stopped working. From there, I switched to the Webmail/Hotmail plugins for Thunderbird which worked well for some time – until it stopped working for both of my Hotmail accounts. While trying to find a remedy for that situation, I discovered that you don’t even need a plugin because Hotmail actually does offer POP3 support – even though they keep telling me otherwise via annoying little announcements in my inbox.

Really, though, this is a good thing for a lot of people because Hotmail is such a popular provider. I just wish they hadn’t gone about it so “sneakily” so that people could actually know about it, you know?

Here’s how:

• POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
• POP SSL required? Yes )This means check SSL on Thunderbird)
• User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
• Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
• SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25) {Note: If port 25 has been blocked in your network or by your ISP, you can set SMTP port to 587 with TLS or SSL Encryption depending on the client in use}
• Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
• TLS/SSL required? Yes

Tags: email, hotmail, plugins, pop3

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.