Setting up Hotmail via POP3

Connecting to Hotmail via POP3 might be old news to everyone but I thought I’d cover it here just in case, as it doesn’t seem to be that well publicized online. I set it up on my old phone ages ago but have only just got round to it on my new device; typically I couldn’t remember the details so I did a quick Bing. What surprised me was how difficult it was to find the information…most blogs, forums, sites I encountered either said “It can’t be done” or “It can be done, but you need to pay for it”!

It can be done and it doesn’t cost anything, here are the details you need:

POP server = pop3.live.com (Port 995)

POP SSL Required = Yes

Username = Live ID

Password = Your hotmail password

SMTP Server = smtp.live.com (Port 25 or 587)

Authentication Required = Yes

TLS/SSL Required = Yes

Using these details I got it all set up and working on my device in just a few minutes.

Thanks to www.WindowsPhoneExpert.com for the info (again).

Exchange Online & Android

The other day at work I was asked if you can connect Android phones to Exchange Online…so I went off to investigate.

Microsoft’s page gives a list of devices and supported OS’s:

http://www.microsoft.com/online/mobility/exchange-activesync.mspx

I’ve got the HTC Hero and so does the person who asked, so that’s the route my investigation took, I opened up the “Mail” section on my phone and went to work.

The auto-detect feature doesn’t work with Exchange Online (or so it seems) so it’s on to manual setup, which asks for:

• Email Address
• Server Name
• Domain
• Username (Same as the email address)
• Password

Apart from a couple, they’re all pretty self explanatory but there’s one that could trip you up:

Server Name:

There are 3 different server URLs depending on location:

but it just wasn’t working for  me, so I called Microsoft BPOS support. After a bit of a false start, they were very helpful and gave me a call to work through the issues.

I navigated to OWA through my browser (mail.microsoftonline.com)but couldn’t log in. I then found it was resolving itself to the “red001…” address, which clearly wasn’t right as I’m in the UK, so I cleared all my bookies, cache etc and went back to the setup screen.

I tried again and still no luck, but then I tried one last thing…entering the server URL without the “https://” and the start. To be honest, I’m not sure why I tried that (although I’m equally sure that someone more techie than me would have tried that first!) but it worked! Entering simply “red002.mail.emea.microsoftonline.com” worked a charm and BOOM, I could see my emails on my Android device. A quick check revealed that the calendar and contacts were syncing too…brilliant

I hope that helps anyone wondering if this can be done and/or having trouble getting it working