Hotmail Access from Mail.app Finally Works
I was a huge fan of Hotmail when it was first introduced. I loved that they started with their entire infrastructure being linux boxes - when the easy path was to choose Windows. I used it, told everyone about it, and loved the independence of it. This was years before Google was even a search engine - let alone "gmail". So the idea of a free web-based email was new. There was Yahoo, but that was limited unless you were a paid subscriber, and there was Hotmail.
Then they got bought up by Microsoft, and the slow dive began. It was clear that they wanted to show that they could build the same great service on Windows, but in the end, it was a miserable failure in the first years. I had almost given up on it. Then it started to come back. MSN IM was the first real decent thing of that old system, and then things built on that and got better. Now, it's decent, but completely overshadowed by GMail.
However, they haven't really caught up to GMail because they haven't allowed generic POP/IMAP access to the mail system. Until now, that is. Sure, there was a plugin for Mail.app that would talk to Hotmail, but that was a bit of a hit-n-miss proposition, and I never really used it because I couldn't really trust it. Now, it seems, we have complete POP capability with SSL encryption to Hotmail.
This hint really goes through most of it, but the big points are these:
- set up a POP source in Mail.app
- the POP3 Server is: pop3.live.com
- the SMTP Server is: smtp.live.com
- your 'Username:' is the complete Hotmail address: you@hotmail.com
When you're done setting it up, Mail.app will recognize that this server allows SSL (excellent!) and it'll be ready to go. Very nice to not have to have Firefox up and running to see emails from Hotmail anymore.