This may seem like old news to someone who’s stayed in the loop (I hadn’t), but as of June 30th 2008 – officially – Outlook Express users could no longer access their email via Outlook Express. Instead, Microsoft decided to force everyone to download their newer Windows Live Mail program (an edition of which was included with Vista from the start).
I don’t know the reasoning behind this other than the branding exercise whereby MS have tried to tie together all their online packages – the toolbar, MSN, Messenger, Mail and so on. Simply, it just makes things complicated for the very casual user when their email stopped working for no apparent reason.
Which is what happened to a friend today. Almost a year after the cut-off date that they knew nothing about. On their work’s email.
Yes, I know having your work email on a freebie service like Hotmail (or is it Live Mail these days?) isn’t ideal but that’s what they’d gone with and it worked for them. As I said, until today when they could receive mail but sending it gave a “host not found” error. Strange as manually entering the host address into Firefox resolved it no problem.
The solution to the issue is simple – download Windows Live Mail from this link and install it. Make sure you un-tick all the boxes for the other stuff you might not want (there are six or seven packages listed) and let the install run. Once it’s in, give it your Hotmail login details and then allow it to search for your Outlook Express installation. It’ll pull in all your contacts, folders and email. Then ditch OE.
Simple, easy… and pointless. Also surprising, given that the official cut-off date was almost a year ago. I guess it’s just one of those things that’s taken time to propagate across the servers.
But, really – making people change program not just have an upgrade?
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My captcha is “Mr.Inside chafed”. I have been drinking but COME ON THAT IS FUNNY. Also, having email problems is not funny. Then again I have Vista, so I have other problems to preoccupy me.
Or they could just use Gmail and Thunderbird (I think Thunderbird also downloads Hotmail)
jac – Vista, eh? You have my sympathies
Andy – yup, or full Outlook or anything else which supports POP/SMTP. Since GMail appeared on the scene and started dishing out free POP/SMTP access, Hotmail joined in. This used to be a premium facility that you had to pay for.
However, Windows Live Mail doesn’t require the input of server names etc. It only asks for the username and password of the account, and a name to refer to it as. End of. Far simpler for bottom-end (no offence intended with that term) users.
If you check the connection parameters in Outlook Express, the server address was http://services.msn.com/svcs/hotmail/httpmail.asp – very unusual.
In fact, you could probably still use OE as the client if you configured the relevant POP and SMTP ports. Which, to me, says that a simple Auto-Update patch would have been enough to reconfigure it to use whatever the new settings are.
Captcha: Workington altoids – sounds like either a cough sweet or a genital problem
You don’t need to use MS’s proprietary HTTPmail thing. It works with POP3 again now and it’s free.
http://windowslivehelp.com/solutions/settings/archive/2009/01/13/pop3-availability-in-windows-live-hotmail.aspx
I’ve not tried LiveMail but I do not trust /any/ MS internet client, as a matter of general principle. They’d be better off with Thunderbird. Before POP3 support came back – it was a premium feature of paid account for years – I used Mr Postman for some time. This works on Windows, OS X and Linux.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mrpostman/
Then I moved to Thunderbird’s Webmail extension, to save mucking around with an external Java app.
http://webmail.mozdev.org/
This works on any platform T’bird runs on.
Liam – see my above reply. Yup, it does work with POP/SMTP (and I think the free availability of GMail “helped” MS decide to do that) but Live Mail is easier for an unskilled user to configure – it simply asks for your Hotmail ID and password and does the rest.
I would agree with you on the other points, though. I’ve installed and recommended Thunderbird to a lot of people although I stick to GMail’s web client myself. Does everything I need although I did have issues with the Labs offline facility when I tried it.
What I ought to do is start using IMAP so I can have a permanent store of my emails on my laptop as well as on GMail, but I haven’t quite got round to it yet!
I swear these captchas are getting cocky: “absent program”. That’s the third apt one today!