Setup Hotmail on your iPhone or any other Email Client

Have been asked this question a couple of times and there's no straight forward solution, so I'll try to keep this as simple as I can.

Firs thing I should mention so that I don't waste anyone's time, I could not find a free soloution. The methods described here both cost a little something.

UPDATE 16-OCT-2009: Please read my post on 'Free Hack to forward hotmail' because I did manage to find a free method.

Firstly, most email companies use either POP or IMAP protocols to talk to the server and most email clients can handle these protocols, hence you can setup your email on mobile devices or any email client. Second, some email providers charge you for the pleasure and some do not.

Hotmail, well this is different kettle of fish since it doesn't use POP or IMAP - hence the headache when you want to setup hotmail on an email client. WHY? For me its just Microsoft being diffcult (and I do love Microsoft, really). Or I hear it's a way they control the advertising, but who knows and who cares - you just want your hotmail on your iPhone or mobile device.

The first solution is provided by IzyMail, where you create an account and then IzyMail takes care of pulling your hotmail and allowing you access via its own server. I believe there is a $20 a year registration fee, but its free to trial. You can get full setup instructions from http://v3.izymail.com/

The second method which I will detail, uses a gmail (Google's free email service) account. There a catch, you will require a paid hotmail account (hotmail plus), because without this you cannot forward to any email provider. The way it works is that you forward your hotmail to gmail, you setup gmail on you mobile client. The only catch is that all the emails will still be on your hotmail account, even if you delete them from gmail, so you'll have to regularly clean up your hotmail account. Small price to pay. There's also a method to make the reply from your mobile email client look like it came from hotmail and not gmail.

As regards paying for hotmail, you could subscribe for 1 year and have this forwarding solution detailed below, in the meantime you have given yourself one year to change over all your accounts to your new free gmail account, then once the subscription if over, you could close out your hotmail account altogether. I know it sounds painful, but you'll never regret it.

1. Create a gmail account http://mail.google.com/mail/signup
   
   
   



2. Login to your hotmail account, click on the options in the top right corner, just under sign out.
   



3. Click on 'Forward mail to another e-mail account'
   



4. Check the 'Forward mail to another e-mail account' and in the text box enter your newly created gmail address. Then click Save.
   



5. Login to your new gmail account http://www.gmail.com and click on settings (top right)
   



6. Select the 'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' tab, and under IMAP access check the enable IMAP, then click on save changes.
   



7. If you want your replies to look like they came from hotmail, then within gmail settings.
1. click on the 'Accounts' tab, in the section 'Send mail as:'


2. click on 'Add another email address'.
   



3. A popup will open asking name and email address as you want them to appear in your replies, enter and click 'Next step'
   



4. Now click 'Send Verfication' (you must be the owner of the email address)
   



5. Your hotmail will have received an email from gmail with a verification code, get this code from the email and enter the code and press 'Verify'



6. All done, you should be back to your main window and your hotmail address should appear in 'Send Mail as:' section
7. Now in the same section check 'Reply from the same address to which the message was sent'

All done in terms of the email setup - so you've created a Google email account, forwarded your Hotmail to this new Google email account, and if you've followed the instructions in Step 7 you'll find that any email in your Google email that came from hotmail should appear as if I replied from my Hotmail account.

The last step if to configure your email client on your mobile or computer. For this Google has some handy guides. Go to http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12913. Under 'Configuring', select your email client or device and follow the steps.

All done. You have your Hotmail on your chosen email client. Don't forget that your hotmail account still gets all the emails, so you have to cleanup. Also, if you do not login to your hotmail account every 120 days your account will be deactivate. The good news on the gmail front is that you setup IMAP and hence your gmail account and your email client is synchronised 2-way, so no cleanup required, whatever you do in gmail or in your email client reflects the other.

Better than all of this is to just discard hotmail completely and get a gmail account. I know its easier said than done, but I migrated from Yahoo to gmail some time back and it's been well worth it I'd say.

Hope this helps someone.