Windows Live Hotmail is rolling out a new build, including POP and SMTP access from any mail client (including iPhone).
Hotmail has been supporting POP and SMTP for Hotmail Plus users for a while, but the demand for a general availablility of Hotmail POP access has been high, especially with GMail in the background, featuring all this for free.
Is it already available for me?
POP with Hotmail is not available throughout the world yet. The Windows Live team states:
We are happy to announce that POP3 technology is now available to Hotmail users in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. If you don’t see your country or region in this list, never fear, we’ll be rolling POP3 out to more parts of the world later this year.
How do I enable POP access to Hotmail in my mail client?
That depends on your client. I will show you the example of Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, but other mail clients are similar.
- Click “Tools”, “Account Settings…”.
- On the “E-mail” tab, click “New…”.
- If you are prompted to “Choose E-mail Service”, select “Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP, or HTTP”, and click “Next”.
- Check the checkbox at “Manually configure server settings or additional server types”, and click “Next”.
- Select “Internet e-mail” and click “Next”.
- In the section “User Information”, enter your name and your Hotmail address.
- In the section “Server Information”, select “POP3” as “Account Type”, enter “pop3.live.com” as “Incoming mail server” and “smtp.live.com” as “Outgoing mail server”.
- “Logon Information” are your Hotmail address (including @hotmail.com or @live.com), along with your password.
- Now click the button “More Settings…”, and switch to the “Outgoing Server” tab.
- Check the checkbox “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication”.
- On the “Advanced” tab, at “Incoming server (POP3)”, check the checkbox “This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL)”.
- At “Outgoing server (SMTP)”, open the select box “Use the following type of encrypted connection”, and choose “TLS”.
- Now click “OK”, “Next” and “Finish”. You’re done!
Be sure I will notify you as soon as POP via Hotmail is available everywhere, including the U.S.