Thursday, March 01, 2007

Reading your Hotmail email directly from Gmail

This is a simple hack that will allow you to read your free Hotmail (No POP3 enabled) emails directly from GMail.

Recently GMail has enabled a feature that allows you to read mail from other POP3 enabled email accounts . (To learn more in detail how to set this up please read the instructions ...however this is of no great importance to our hack.)

Now my problem was that I always forgot to check my hotmail account so I thought why not make use of this new GMail feature to automatically poll my Hotmail messages into one inbox.

As you might (not) be aware however that Hotmail (the free version) has no POP3 support so I registered an account on IzyMail which basically asks for your username and password and then provides a POP3 server on IzyMail from which you can connect to retrieve your HotMail electronic mails.

After you register this is what you will get on your IzyMail screen as settings:

User name:
(Account name) javed@hotmail.com

including the ...@hotmail.com part!

Password: •••••• (your password)

Incoming server: in.izymail.com
Outgoing server: out.izymail.com
Server type: POP / POP3 or IMAP / IMAP4


Now all you need to do is to fire up your Gmail then you click on Settings -> Account


Here you can see I have already configured a hotmail account , it gives me an indication on when it was last checked.

Click on Add another mail account to retrieve email from in the Get mail from other accounts section.

Now fill in your hotmail username and password :

In the POP server section however replace the default value with the following: in.izymail.com

You can optionally add a label to messages that come from your hotmail account such as you recognize from where they originate. To do this check the Lable incoming messages option.

Hit Add Account to finish the wizard.

Thats it now you can check your Hotmail directly from Gmail !

[3/3/07 update: It has come to my attention that www.izymail.com is not a totally free service so am busy looking for an alternative , if you have one please post in comments.

Maybe the people hosting www.izymail.com will come to realise that they could make more bucks if they prolonged the trial period or provided a free version of izymail thus opening up to more customers with the help of google's new feature :P
]

32 comments:

Anonymous said...

The bad IT guys at work have installed squidGuard and we cant access yahoomail, hotmail and gmail anymore. So i still wudnt be able to use it that izy thing to check my mails. But hey i found a proxy site to go through :P

Anyway hope you're doing fine Javed. Went to see roxy's baby the week before last - he's a lovely baby :)

Keep in touch coco ;)

Unknown said...

Hi there,
hope ure doing fine.well you can always have it installed at home it saves me a whole bunch of time as I have windows hotmail live and the interface is annoying and it takes a lot of time for me to verify my hotmail.

When the emails from hotmail arrive into my GMail I can very easily manipulate them .. i just love GMail can't live without it.

Yeah they told me you went to see my little nephew ..can't wait to see him myself.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Unknown said...

Thank you, I have it up and running! Sweet.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your post. I have one thing to add, though, and you may want to do me a little favor:

We are trying to get rid of that 'pop3hot.com' domain name for years and can't if people keep referencing it :-))

I would really prefer www.izymail.com and would appreciate if you could change the link in your post. Thank you.

Ingenting said...

there's only one problem, izymail isn't free?

Unknown said...

The only problem, with this excellent solution (I've been wanting to check my Hotmail in Gmail forever, so thank you for that) is that IzyMail is not free.

It has a 30 message trial period, then you need to buy the service which is roughly $2/month ...which is a bit much for something that isn't exactly crucial.

Unknown said...

Am a bit concerned with this trial period thing any one has the direct link to the page that states that?

Jamie said...

I am so disappointed in the entire cost thing. Could they not at least offer a per email charge (say $0.25)? Disappointing.

Anonymous said...

Nice Stuff but IzyMail is not good after 20 days. Here is the link http://v3.izymail.com/what.aspx#comp

Anonymous said...

everything was fine until i realised that "Trial registrations have a download quota of 30 messages." in Izymail

Unknown said...

Great service indeed, only 1 very bad thing: it's not free!

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately this option is not available on Google Apps for your domain ;(

Anonymous said...

> Jamie said...
> I am so disappointed in the entire cost thing.
> Could they not at least offer a per email charge (say $0.25)?
> Disappointing.

Great idea ...

An average user receives 7 emails per day = 210 per month. 210 * $0.25 = $52.50 per month - WOW!

Compare that to the current bargain of $1.49 per mon or $0.007 per email ...

BTW: How much do you pay per SMS ??

©mderome said...

Excellent solutions, but like others it's not free. ButI've been using an alternative for a while and quite happy with it. And its free. So check it out http://www.e-eeasy.com/GetMail.aspx

Enjoy :-)

Michael G said...

is there anyway to get hotmail into my outlook express?

seaeaglesrule said...

Here are 2 free programs that will allow you to download Hotmail & other web emails to any email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. They both run on Windows, Mac & Linux: MrPostman & FreePOPs. They work with the recent changes to Hotmail. I've wrote a review of them a few days ago - you can read it here: Hotmail users - easily download emails to your email client.

Unknown said...

I tried this one,

http://www.e-eeasy.com/GetMail.aspx

It works like a charm. Yeah ...it requires running a small app on your computer, but you just hide it down to a tray icon. Works just fine, and it is free :)

Unknown said...

dude thanx alot
I have not check my MSN-Hotmail account in ages. then when i check it I jsut del all [who will reply 2 all of them?] ..
thanx agaiin

Anonymous said...

My email client in Windows is POPPeeper. Besides POP3, it supports Hotmail & Yahoo & Gmail and many other protocols.

http://www.poppeeper.com/

Unknown said...

so can we get from more than 1 email account?

oldskooladdict said...

Thanks for this - it looks really useful - as you say, its too easy to leave a hotmail account unattended and have a huge build up of mail! (even if 90% of it is uesless!)

Unknown said...

Thank you so much :P

Anonymous said...

great tip, thanks !!

Anonymous said...

Getmail is sweet! I strongly recommend it. I just install it and it works great. Thanks god I found this program, now my iPhone is complete :)

Roberto Iza Valdés said...

Many thanks for the tip. And thanks also for the tips in your readers's comments.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your nice post!

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much !

Anonymous said...

getmail worked great!

here's a good place to download without the offers http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/Mail-Utilities/GetMail2.shtml

Unknown said...

would the emails still be stored in the hotmail account???

or do they get deleted from hotmail servers?

thanks

Anonymous said...

i think these setting will no longer needed. Pop3 for hotmail is active and free now, no more external things needed

Read

http://krishnan.co.in/blog/post/POP-3-access-to-Hotmail.aspx

and

http://krishnan.co.in/blog/post/Windows-Live-Hotmail-POP3-Access-for-other-countries.aspx

Anonymous said...

I have never before in my life seen a "seller" mock his/her potential "byers". Seriously, I do not think Ulrich Schwanitz can expect much affinity from people like Jamie after a post so sarcastic.

It is true that Jamies "math" is not the best out there and Schwanitz is correct in pointing that out. But going further saying things like "Great idea ..." and "BTW: How much do you pay per SMS ??" makes this whole thing personal and sarcasm surely does not help.

And the funny thing is that all Jamie talked about was "disappointment"...

Anyway, people are free to say whatever they want, that's why I propose a general boycott of IzyMail and instead use ANY other equally functional and (most likely) TOTALLY free alternative.

And BTW it would have been more helpful (and less manipulating) if IzyMail were crystal clear about their "free registration" and "feature comparison" was not "burried" 3 levels down in the web (here ---> site .izymail.com/what.aspx#comp) but "in-your-face" in the home page. Even the way it is now, it's not 100% clear what the trial version can do or not. It's a well known sly marketing/sales tactic but eventually, people "get it" and "spin off".

Oh well...