One More Tap

I previously mentioned about getting email onto your iPhone or iPod touch, including Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail. Also in the equation are other POP3 and IMAP based email services. What about Hotmail, the free email service provided by Microsoft?

Before this, it’s remotely impossible to get Hotmail on your device, unless you pay a premium and subscribe to a Windows Live Hotmail Plus account that allows email retrieval using the POP3 standard.

It seems that Microsoft seems to have soften up, thanks to the competition like Google and Yahoo. Gmail has got IMAP access enabled by default, while Yahoo! Mail allows the same set of features to iPhone and iPod touch users. In a recent blog posting, the Windows Live Team announced the availability of POP3 access to Hotmail users from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Also mentioned in the posting is that POP3 access will be rolled out to even more countries later this year.

I’d thought of posting this good news a few days back, but it doesn’t seem to work on my device, so I held back for a few days. You see, I have my Hotmail account’s country setting set to the United States. After reading a few weblog postings that one may change the country to any of the supported list to get POP3 access, I did so and changed mine to Australia – I love this beautiful country. Doing so only results in constant error messages whenever I open up the mail application.I am not sure why, but I lived with the error messages for a while – until this morning.

All of a sudden, I began to see mail from my Hotmail account (erm, some spam and chain mails – I don’t use this mail account primarily) and the error message disappeared. Puzzle solved! I guess the Hotmail servers needed some time to synchronize themselves before allowing me the much-sought after POP3 access.

Here’s how you’ll configure Hotmail for your device. Before doing this, make sure you login to your Hotmail account, then look for an Options menu on the far right-hand side of the screen. Click on it to see a drop down menu, then choose More Options. In the next page that appears, click on View and edit your personal information. In the new page (yes, there’s a lot of pages, Microsoft just seems to like making things complicated) click on Registered Information link. Choose one of the supported countries from the drop down list. I changed both my Home and Work locations to Australia. Click on Save to ensure that the settings stick.

Next, open up the Settings application in your iPhone or iPod touch. The following menu structure is taken from my iPod touch running firmware 2.2.1 and may be a little different from your device depending on the firmware version you have. Select Mail, Contacts, Calendar > Add Account. Choose Other, then type in your Name, Email Address, Password and a Description for this account. Click Save to be greeted with a page that says you’ll need a Windows Live Hotmail Plus subscription – click on Next to continue. You’ll be greeted with a pop-up message saying that the password entered is incorrect, never fear, just tap on OK to continue. Both Incoming Mail Server and Outgoing Mail Server parameters will be populated automatically, simply tap on Save to continue. Note that you’ll need to change the SMTP’s port to 25. Do this by going into the Hotmail account that you just configured and tap on SMTP under Outgoing Mail Server. That’s it.

As mentioned earlier, you’ll be prompted with an error message the next time you access the Mail application. Just ignore it for a day or two. You’ll eventually see your Hotmail email appearing. If not, double-check to ensure that you have the settings correct.

Now, there are some weak points with Hotmail on an iPhone or iPod touch since its using the POP3 protocol. For a start, the POP3 protocol does not allow folders to be synced. You only get a ‘copy’ of your email which you can read while on the go. Moving them to another folder does not work as well – you’ll only be able to do this when you get back to a desktop. Needless to say, you will not be able to see items from other folders as well – just the default set of folders like Inbox, Sent Mail and Trash will be visible.

Regardless, this seems to be a good move by the guys over at Redmond. I’d love to see a more complete implementation when they roll this out in more countries. Since I can now get Hotmail on my device, I’ll be using that account more popularly when signing up for deals or newsletter websites.

written by xcool \\ tags: Email, iPhone, iPod touch