MozillaZine

Accessing Your Hotmail Account Using Mozilla Mail

Sunday November 23rd, 2003

Andy Rossmeissl writes: "I wrote this page a while ago that details exactly how to get your Hotmail account set up in the Mozilla Mail client. Uses all open-source software. Enjoy." Bear in mind that this may violate Microsoft's terms of service.

#1 Picture

by coch

Sunday November 23rd, 2003 9:32 PM

Hehe, very nice pic you got there. It will become one of my favorites.

#2 similar: Hotmail Popper

by jesse

Sunday November 23rd, 2003 9:37 PM

http://www.boolean.ca/hotpop/

#3 thunderbird

by techn9ne

Sunday November 23rd, 2003 9:45 PM

will it work w/ thunderbird?

#4 Re: Hotmail Popper

by arossmeissl

Sunday November 23rd, 2003 9:53 PM

I checked out Hotpop a while ago and was largely dissatisfied. Didn't seem to work right (e.g. deleting messages), and it wasn't open-source. I also don't like cluttering my system tray . . .

#5 Re: thunderbird

by arossmeissl

Sunday November 23rd, 2003 9:54 PM

Sure, it will work with Thunderbird. In fact, it will work with any POP email client; just follow the same setup instructions.

#6 Netscape webmail ?

by yalishanda

Sunday November 23rd, 2003 10:28 PM

Any hope of getting this kind of workaround for Netscape Webmail ?

#13 Re: Netscape webmail ?

by mcbridematt

Monday November 24th, 2003 4:37 AM

Try getting your hands on a Netscape branch on cvs.mozilla.org and see how it does it.

AFAIK I think Netscape Webmail had IMAP access.

#16 Re: Netscape webmail ?

by willll

Monday November 24th, 2003 4:53 PM

there is a file somewhere in the netscape folder called nswebmail.rdf . just copy this file to the same relative location in your mozilla directory

#20 Re: Re: "It's a good thing"

by groovestar

Tuesday November 25th, 2003 2:31 PM

Cool, thanks for the tip. I just did this (using the nswebmail.rdf from NS7.1) and added my Netscape Webmail account to my Mozilla 1.5 installation. Unfortunately every time I try to get messages from it I get a "Failed to connect to server imap.mail.netcenter.com." error immediately. What am I doing wrong?

#23 Ick

by witbrock

Friday December 5th, 2003 2:48 PM

So has anyone got this to work... it seems as if it shouldn't, since it was supposed to drive people to use Netscape (I'm still, alas, using NS7.1 just to get the IMAP connection), but, now, what should they care?

Anyway, If someone can confirm that it's possible to access netscape.net mail via mozilla mail, that would be great news!

#7 microsoft to buy mozilla

by mss

Sunday November 23rd, 2003 11:20 PM

as posted in another area, this is another indication to impress microsoft. MSS

#8 gotmail

by lacostej

Monday November 24th, 2003 12:06 AM

I've been running gotmail without problems for more than a year.

#9 Oh s**t

by mcbridematt

Monday November 24th, 2003 1:49 AM

It appears to use parsing of the hotmail site.

Problem is that M$ is preparing a new hotmail layout at http://www.hotmail-ppe.com (ppe stands for Passport Prep Enviroment, where potential passport-enabled sites test in a "safe enviroment. See http://mcbridematt.dhs.org/hotmail-ppe/ )

Oh damn.

#10 Re: Oh s**t

by erik

Monday November 24th, 2003 2:51 AM

It still amazes me that people use this technique for Hotmail (and Yahoo) when Hotmail uses a well defined protocol based on WebDAV called HTTPMail (?). There are several projects at source forge that works with this protocol. Why make simple things hard by parsing the HTML?

#11 Ditch hotmail/yahoo, get IMAP

by brodie

Monday November 24th, 2003 3:56 AM

Why do you guys even bother with these crappy webmail sites with small account sizes and only web access. Sign up with a real email provided like http://fastmail.fm and get web and IMAP access to your account. Then you don't have to worry about these screen scraping products. (Note: I don't have anything to do with fastmail, not even an account)

#22 Re: Ditch hotmail/yahoo, get IMAP

by VMD

Wednesday November 26th, 2003 9:41 AM

Another good email account is http://www.myrealbox.com/. It gives you 10MB and is both POP or IMAP. You don't need MrPostman for it. Just add the account.

I would like to say that I did install MrPostman last night to use with my seldomly used Hotmail account and it appears to be working great. Thanks!!!

#27 MyRealBox "full"

by tswann01

Saturday January 17th, 2004 6:43 PM

Jan 13, 2004

Important Notice The MyRealBox system is no longer accepting new accounts at this time. The MyRealBox system currently has sufficient users for providing a quality beta service.

#12 Alternative on linux

by onelists

Monday November 24th, 2003 4:26 AM

In stall hotwayd (http://hotwayd.sourceforge.net/) and then simply set your hotmail accounts up in Mozilla mail as local pop accounts.

#14 Interesting...

by redemption

Monday November 24th, 2003 7:59 AM

... because I'd just blogged on this earlier, on Hotmail Popper (http://www.boolean.ca/hotpop/).

Why do we bother with Hotmail accounts? Because of "legacy" I guess. Some of us just use these accounts to receive newsletters and for fake registrations (that's what I do). Hotmail was, unfortunately, one of the biggest and earliest free email services back in the day.

Make no mistake, I prefer to access my email using IMAP, and I recommend http://fastmail.fm/ like brodie did.

#15 On Hotmail Portals

by gssq

Monday November 24th, 2003 8:04 AM

These are a dime a dozen, but what cripples most of them is their inability to send mail, since fixing up a way to translate SMTP requests into Hotmail actions is harder.

Hotpop manages this admirably (and is free too). Izymail does it too, with IMAP to boot, but is ridiculously expensive and the shareware version is horribly crippled.

#17 Subject

by alcatraz52

Monday November 24th, 2003 9:25 PM

Grr..I can't get it to work! I keep getting errors all over the place.

1) I can't start the service for any reasonable amount of time- it appears in the service list as "Automatic" but when starting I get this:

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner>net start mrpostman The MrPostman service is starting... The MrPostman service could not be started.

A system error has occurred.

System error 1 has occurred.

Incorrect function. ----------------

2) It's weird because *this* is what happens when I have the Admin Tool Service Console Open: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner>net start mrpostman The MrPostman service is starting. The MrPostman service was started successfully.

but then it stops after again!

ANYWAY- in all cases, I get an the error that "localhost" (and I've also tried 127.0.0.1) can't be found. However, sending messages from my Hotmail account works! Can anyone help me, please? I've felt like a looney toon for the past hour ;)

I have a NAT router; would this affect it?

#18 Subject

by alcatraz52

Monday November 24th, 2003 9:26 PM

Grr..I can't get it to work! I keep getting errors all over the place.

1) I can't start the service for any reasonable amount of time- it appears in the service list as "Automatic" but when starting I get this:

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner>net start mrpostman The MrPostman service is starting... The MrPostman service could not be started.

A system error has occurred.

System error 1 has occurred.

Incorrect function.

2) It's weird because *this* is what happens when I have the Service Console open (but then it stops after again!):

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner>net start mrpostman The MrPostman service is starting. The MrPostman service was started successfully.

ANYWAY- in all cases, I get an the error that "localhost" (and I've also tried 127.0.0.1) can't be found. However, sending messages from my Hotmail account works! Can anyone help me, please? I've felt like a looney toon for the past hour ;)

I have a NAT router; would this affect it?

#19 Re: Subject

by arossmeissl

Tuesday November 25th, 2003 12:05 PM

I can't duplicate this . . . anybody else run into this problem?

#21 Hotpop/mail deletion

by pipthepixie

Wednesday November 26th, 2003 2:14 AM

For some reason, whenever I delete a message from my Hotmail account using Thunderbird via Hotmail Popper, it doesn't actually delete it from the server (yes, I have "delete from server when moved to trash" selected, which means that to Thunderbird my mail is junk free, yet in actual fact it's slowly filling up.

#24 Update

by arossmeissl

Friday December 5th, 2003 10:15 PM

Hotmail's markup structure changed, so the MrPostman project has provided an update. Please see http://2mod2.com/mohot for details.

#25 Fastmail

by XxXxX

Monday December 15th, 2003 7:07 PM

Just followed suggestions from previous poster and signed up for fastmail. I liked their service immediately. If you dont have a fastmail account, go sign up for one! Fastmail can be configured to receive hotmail emails!

#26 Fastmail

by XxXxX

Monday December 15th, 2003 7:23 PM

Just followed suggestions from previous poster and signed up for fastmail. I liked their service immediately. If you dont have a fastmail account, go sign up for one! Fastmail can be configured to receive hotmail emails!

#28 Doesn't seem to work

by DarkPhoenix

Tuesday February 3rd, 2004 6:19 PM

I followed the instructions, and it didn't work. The service won't start. I think it's because it doesn't tell you where MrPostman-20031206.jar comes from. It's not in the download file.

#29 Re: Doesn't seem to work

by DarkPhoenix

Tuesday February 3rd, 2004 8:51 PM

Now when I start it up, it says the service starts, then stops immediately. No matter what.

#30 Unable to use mozilla with fastmail.fm service

by cs_rajesh

Monday March 15th, 2004 7:40 AM

what could be the problem? I have a fastmail account; I went up to their faq and set up the mozilla client as per the specification; I just get an error = failed to connect to server imap.proxy.fastmail.fm. ( I am behind a firewall and according to the faq I was asked to use the string "imap.proxy.fastmail.fm" as the server name.)

#31 Access to tigermoth243@hotmail.com

by OEALR

Monday June 28th, 2004 4:30 AM

MSN denies access to any email posted aswell asto my free hotmail account if I don't buy their $19.95 package that is worthless for me as I have a 50 times better deal from Yahoo. Also please help, if you can to remove any & all such advertising from hotmail the continuously clutters my screen & prevents access to all other or further messages that were posted on MSN messenger. THANK YOU!!! oealr

#32 I NEED HELP

by TilleR

Wednesday November 17th, 2004 8:13 AM

hey guys, i did what it said to do @ http://2mod2.com/mohot but it won't let me send mail, only recieve it. I need some help! (I'm not really good @ this since i'm sorta new to it!) Thanks for the help!