the empty quarter

For a long time the only way to access and use a Hotmail account from Thunderbird was the WebMail extension. All in all, this is a great solution but it always seemed a bit of a workaround since in the background it “pretends” to be a browser, downloads the Hotmail HTML and parses it to get and send emails.

This has recently changed since the Hotmail team has come to its senses and now once again allows POP3 and SMTP access to the service. This means it is now straightforward to configure Thunderbird to use Hotmail, and no extensions are required.

As summarized by poster vtel57 on Google Groups:

incoming server: pop3.live.com – port 995 – SSL
outgoing server: smtp.live.com – port 587 – TLS
Be sure that Secure Password Authentication is NOT checked.
Works like a champ! 🙂

Indeed it does, and we will even forgive vtel57 the use of a smiley.

One more thing to note is that once configured to use POP, Thunderbird will download the entire contents of your Hotmail inbox. So it is a good idea to do a bit of a clean up by deleting old items or moving them to an archive folder.