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Thursday 24 May 2007

Thunderbird and Hotmail

Something seems to have changed today so you can no longer use the old Hotmail with Thunderbird 2. However, if you switch to the new Live Hotmail, and change a setting in the Hotmail extension, Hotmail will work again in Thunderbird 2.

1. Make sure you have the new versions of Webmail and Hotmail for TB 2 from
http://webmail.mozdev.org/installation.html
If you don't, uninstall the old extensions, then install the Webmail extension, then the Hotmail extension.

2. Go into the options in the Hotmail extension and check off "Hotmail Live (new website)".

Everything should work okay now.

If you don't have Thunderbird 2, get it.

UPDATE
Currently, you can't use hotmail for the outgoing server. You have to use something else - usually your regular ISP's outgoing server.


7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the hint!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your advice, but I'm having a problem here.

I've just got myself a MacBook Pro (3 days ago) having been a PC user before. Still adjusting and on a voyage of discovery.

I've just started using Thunderbird and had no problem setting it up for my AOL email, but can't seem to get Hotmail working - in particular I'm not sure if I have properly installed the extensions you recommended.

Can this be done on a Mac, and if so can you give an idiot's guide?

I would be very grateful for any assistance.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your hints and tutorials on how to get Thunderbird set up with hotmail.

I recently got a new Dell with Vista Home Premium and was bummed when I found out there was no Outlook Express and Windows mail didn't support hotmail accounts anymore!

Your tips got me up to the point where I try to send or recieve email and I get an error box saying "sending of message failed. The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP localhost failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your SMTP server setting is correct and try again, or else contact your network administrator."

I've tried both Hotmail and new live mail settings and have switched from live to hotmail and back again and changed the settings in webmail/hotmail.

is there something i'm doing wrong? I see it has worked for many other people but I am at a loss!

Thanks!

Thor said...

Change your outgoing server for hotmail to your ISP's outgoing server. You can send emails for various different web-based account through your ISP's outgoing server.

Anonymous said...

using thunderbird 2, downloaded webmail and hotmail extensions. still cannot access my hotmail account, checked the live mail box.

is there special server setting I am not entering correctly for the hotmail account?

Thor said...

Make sure to read my later posts on this issue as there are updates to the settings. Also, make sure you have the latest versions of the Webmail and Hotmail extensions installed.

Something else to watch out for is the outgoing email setting in AVG Free 8 (if you use AVG - see my recent post about that too)

Heather said...

Also be sure to put your full user name, xxx@hotmail.com, not the default xxx.