Use MS Office Outlook Connector To Access Your Hotmail Account In Outlook
Users having an account in MSN Hotmail or Windows Live Hotmail (more popularly known as just “Hotmail”), were previously able to configure their Hotmail account to MS Outlook with the help of HTTP connection. However, the HTTP connection method no longer works and Hotmail users need to subscribe for the paid Hotmail Plus service.
The moment a user attempts to configure Hotmail to MS Outlook through HTTP connection, he/she gets an error message saying that the user need to subscribe in order to access Hotmail via MS Outlook and prompts the user to sign up via the URL http://join.msn.com/general/Email.
Sometimes a different error message might occur notifying the user that the login credentials are invalid and Outlook might keep on prompting the user to input the correct password even though the user has already entered a valid one.
However, you may resolve this issue and access your Hotmail account from Outlook by using MS Office Outlook Connector, a free utility provided by Microsoft. This connector can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center. It is also available as a Windows Live Essentials component.
Configuring your hotmail account to Outlook using MS Office Outlook Connector has a number of advantages over POP3 and HTTP connection. This connector allows you to access and efficiently manage your Hotmail account including contacts, email messages and calendars from Outlook itself.
Within Outlook, you can apply rules, Junk Mail filter, macros, alerts, etc. to your synchronized email messages. To use this connector, you need to follow the below mentioned steps.
- First of all, download “OutlookConnector.exe” and install it.
- Once the installation process is over, launch Microsoft Outlook. The MS Office Outlook Connector will ask you to input your login details and the sender name which needs to be tagged with the outgoing emails.
- Once you have entered all the required information, you will see a new folder “Hotmail” added to your Mail Folders tree of Outlook.
- You need to expand the node “Hotmail” so as to access your Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Sent Items, Junk E-mail, etc. You will find new additions namely “Contacts” and “Calendar”.
- For syncing your emails in Hotmail account and MS Outlook, all you need to do is click on the “Send/Receive” button. Sometimes, Outlook will automatically receive your emails based on present interval.
You may also access multiple Hotmail accounts using the MS Outlook Connector. For doing so, you simply need to go to the menu bar, click on the pull down menu for Outlook Connector and select the option for adding a new account.
You may use MS Office Outlook Connector with MS Outlook 2003 and 2007 versions only. For rest of the email clients, Hotmail is in a process of adding SMTP and POP3 to enable users to retrieve their emails using POP3 protocol.