Good news for Hotmail aka Windows Live Hotmail users.

I didn’t notice that Microsoft has enabled POP3 for Hotmail/Windows Live Hotmail couple of weeks ago. This means your Hotmail emails can be downloaded to any email client such as Outlook or Mozilla Firebird.

Although the blog post said it is rolled out only for users from United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, but this little hack enabled POP3 for users originated from countries. No more countries restriction!

In my experiment (after following the hack, which basically modify from which country you are), I use Windows Live Mail email client (the setup on the right), the emails started being downloaded once everything in place.

With Hotmail following Gmail steps, now only Yahoo Mail that still not providing POP3 support for Yahoo Mail free account( Yahoo Mail Plus has POP3 enabled).

The full setting -

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
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)
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

via