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Anyway, I got wind a couple of weeks ago that Miscosoft's huge and venerable Hotmail email service, now known as Windows Live Hotmail, with over 270 million users worldwide and available in 35 different languages, has started supporting free POP3 access (Hotmail POP3 access was formerly available only to users who ponied up $19.95 for the enhanced Hotmail Plus service), perhaps feeling the competition from Google's Gmail which has offered free POP 3 from the get-go. POP 3 support also facilitates accessing your Hotmail/Windows Live email account using a smartphone's email client, which is becoming a huge factor. Although you always could access Hotmail on your web-enabled mobile phone by going to mobile.live.com, now that Hotmail has POP3, you can get to it more conveniently using the email software on your Windows Mobile phone, iPhone, or BlackBerry.
On Valentine's Day the Windows Live Blog announced that POP3 support is now available to Hotmail users in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands for starters with service to more parts of the world coming later this year.
Typically Cranky Microsoftian Adventure
Unfortunately, the signup procedure, which is admirably simple and straightforward in theory, turned out to be a typically angular Microsoftian adventure in practice. The signup page was dreadfully slow loading over my poky dialup connection, and when I typed in my proposed username and clicked the Check Availability button, a little star wheel started rolling with a "working" message, and that's as far as things would proceed. I was using iCab (which uses Apple's Webkit Safari browser engine), so decided to try a more "mainstream" browser - Netscape Navigator 9 (Firefox 2 Gecko browser engine). The signup page appeared more quickly, but the email domain name menu would only display US Hotmail domain names, unlike with iCab, which offered live.ca as the default domain, and the username I wanted was not available for the U.S. domain.
Opera To The Rescue
I switched to Safari, which brought up the live.ca domain, but like iCab stalled on the availability check. In frustration I opened an old copy of Internet Explorer 5 (I was using one of my old Pismo PowerBooks), but no joy with it either. Finally, Opera 9 with its proprietary Presto browser engine proved the charm, both loading the Canadian domain name and being able to complete the availability check, which happily informed me that my chosen username was still available for live.ca.
Difficult To Decipher
The rest of the signup process went quickly and uneventfully except that I found the CAPTCHA string copy required to complete and submit the signup was even more than usually difficult to decipher. Took me two tries.
In the positive column, my new Webmail account was immediately available at the Hotmail site. The interface is OK - not great - and disappointingly but not surprisingly there is no counterpart to Gmail's thoughtful "Basic HTML" view option offering a bit of relief for dialup hostages like me oGmail's convenient Refresh link.
If you aren't content with the bland but inoffensive and non-distracting default interface theme, you can choose from a selection of alternate themes and other appearance options.
However, I was most interested in POP3 access, configuration details of which are:
- POP3 Server: pop3.live.com (port 995)
- SMTP Server: smtp.live.com (port 25)
Make sure to check the box indicating that your outgoing server requires authentication. Also, Hotmail's POP3 service requires that you use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) with the POP and SMTP connection and use SMTP authentication.
No Luck With Eudora Classic
I had no luck configuring either POP or SMTP in Eudora 6.2.4, still my mainstay email client. I suspect that this long-in-the-tooth software's SSL support may not be up-to-date enough to suit Microsoft, although it works just fine with Gmail, which also requires SSL. Adding insult to injury, attempting to configure a hotmail account in Eudora broke all of my non-Gmail accounts (I have 22 accounts configured in Eudora), and the problem persisted after I deleted the Hotmail account). I had to swap in my backup settings file to restore normalcy.
The SMTP issue may be in that Hotmail specifies Port 25, and as an anti-spam measure my ISP unhelpfully imposes a Port 25 SMTP block on any server using that port other than their own - not unique to Hotmail alas, but tremendously annoying. Gmail gets around ISP Port 25 blocks by using a different port.
Eudora 8 (ie: Thunderbird) Works
Moving along, I tried Hotmail/Live's configuration instructions in Mozilla's Thunderbird and Eudora 8 beta email clients, and it works with them, as I assume it should with any up-to-date POP 3 client software such as OS X Mail.
Not Sure It's Worth The Hassle
Since I've been checking out the new Postbox email client beta (yet another Mozilla Thunderbird clone) for review, I decided to give it a shot with Hotmail POP3 as well, and it works fine for downloading mail from my live.ca account, but no joy with the live.com SMTP server for outgoing although I am able to send mail from my live.ca account from PostBox using my my Gmail SMTP configuration, and I discovered that works as well with Thunderbird itself, T-Bird based Eudora 8, and presumably other T-Bird clone clients, so Hotmail POP3 is usable, although with tractable and user-friendly Gmail available I'm not sure it's worth the hassle unless you already have a Hotmail/Live account, in which case POP 3 support is a nice enhancement.
Charles W. Moore
Tags: Hot Topics ď Reviews ď Internet Reviews ď
