I got my first real email account my freshman year in college (I had an AOL account before that, which technically was an email account, but only later). Back then the unix email program PINE was state of the art and was the de-facto mail client at most universities. Growing up a Mac user I had never seen a command prompt in my life, but nevertheless, I learned how to use enough of the unix command shell to get my email via the text based reader PINE.

During my freshman year (1994) the only way to read email was to go to the computer lab. I had a laptop, but it wasn’t able to get my email cause there were no Wifi or Ethernet networks to use, and my school didn’t have dial-up accounts (matter of fact, my school used Token Ring networking). However, email was cool enough that I went to the lab all the time and did what anyone does with email when they first use it…. Send around jokes.

Fast forward a year and I discovered the magic of POP. POP stands for Post Office Protocol and it’s a way for an email client to connect to an email server and download your email to your laptop or desktop computer. The first time I used an email client (Claris Emailer) to connect to my university email account using POP I felt liberated. No more unix command line or tiny screen to read emails. I could have a rich experience composing, replying, copying, pasting and dragging messages to folders. How cool! Having been a Mac user it just seemed natural to use a GUI to manage my email.

Since then my appetite has grown beyond POP. I have lots of folders and use lots of computers to access my email, and frankly, I’ve been spoiled by my Microsoft Exchange account for years. However, we have realized that even though we provide rich synchronization of your email and folders with Outlook (via Outlook Connector) and Windows Live Mail lots of people still want and demand POP.

Well, it’s been a dirty little secret that Hotmail has always maintained a POP service for a small segment of customers. It’s always been very limited, and we didn’t want to encourage or offer it to more customers because we’ve always had ambitions for providing for a scalable and cost effective protocol (which POP is not in the world of huge inboxes). Well we now have this protocol, it’s called DeltaSync, and it’s something that Outlook and Windows Live Mail use. What we didn’t want to do is offer POP access and then have Outlook and Windows Live Mail customers use POP over DeltaSync. Now that we have free offline mail access we have focused our energies on offering users who use clients like Eudora, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail the ability to get their Hotmail in those clients. Additionally, most all mobile devices today support POP (including the Apple iPhone) and to date we haven’t been able to offer folks with a data plan a rich way to get their email unless they are using Windows Mobile (and even that is limited depending on carrier).

The story of POP continues like this… A few months ago some folks on the team hatched a plan to finally offer POP and starting this week Hotmail Plus users ($19.95 a year) will be able to use POP access from any device. In the interest of transparency though I want to be clear that we have plans to offer POP to all users (all premium and free) but we aren’t ready to do that yet. I can’t comment on a timeframe for when free users will get POP, but we hope to do so within the next 12 months.

If you do take advantage of this premium feature and sign up for Hotmail plus you’ll also get an ad-free experience, more storage, larger attachment support, and a non expiring account.

Our POP service requires that you use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) with the POP and SMTP connection and use SMTP authentication. This is to ensure that your email address and password are not subject to tampering. The settings are the following:

  • POP: pop3.live.com (port 995)
  • SMTP: smtp.live.com (port 25)
    • Note: make sure you check the box that indicates that your outgoing server requires authentication (in most mail clients this is not checked by default).
  • Username: your full email address
  • Password: your Windows Live ID password

Well I hope this news is welcome, and thanks for being patient!

–Omar Shahine (Lead Program Manager, Hotmail)

PS – please note that I said Hotmail Plus users and not MSN Premium users. We are working to offer everyone POP access eventually, but for now, Hotmail Plus users are the only ones that can do so.

mail news

September 21, 2007

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