Around 9 years ago I was looking for a new mail host to move me away from the fairly basic, ISP supplied, one that I was using (I think it was an oceanfree account?). Plenty of people I knew had hopped onto the Hotmail bandwagon as it was claimed to be faster, offer more storage and have a greater community via MSN Messenger. So I signed up and, compared to my last account, this one was a breath of fresh air. The storage space was amazing for the time, a whole 10MB’s, and the interface was pretty good.

A few years pass and news of the Gmail beta program spreads through the college where I’m studying, eventually nearly everyone has a Gmail account including myself, thanks to the option to send invites to friends. I get my account and it just sits there, not being used, never being accessed. Why? My Hotmail account won’t allow me to forward my emails, because they’ve disabled POP3 access. In fact to get POP3 access they have the audacity to charge me for it, when most other providers have it enabled for free. I said, screw that, and just sat on my hotmail account, hoping they’d soon come to their senses and enable POP3 access.

Recently however, I’ve been moving away from MS products due to their increasing resistance to the community of the internet. I’ve moved from Internet Explorer to Firefox, from MSN Messenger to Pidgin and now, after over 4 years of waiting, I’m finally able to move, completely, from Hotmail to Gmail. Hotmail has just gotten increasingly slow over the years and seems to be against optimizing itself for firefox, preferring instead to disable a lot of its features for people not willing to view their mail in Internet Explorer. I like to beta test new firefox releases (currently on FF 3.2a1) and Hotmail just won’t work in it. It was the last straw.

I went searching the net for a solution, anything, so long as I could move my emails from Hotmail I’d be fine. Which is when I stumbled across the news, Microsoft, very recently, has finally started to unlock POP3 access for its free hotmail accounts. I suppose they imagine most people will simply use this access to access their mail via local mail clients like Thunderbird or Outlook, but I’d say the majority will use it to finally leave their Hotmail account behind.

Unfortunately, Microsoft are only rolling out POP3 access in a few areas at a time. At the moment only these countries have free POP3 access: United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

If, however, you can’t wait any longer (like myself) here are some steps to take to change the country your account is tied to. I’ve completed them myself so I can personally guarantee that I did not lose any of my emails.

The steps can be found here: Windows Live POP3 Access

Also, when setting up another account in Gmail, these are the details you will need:

POP server: pop3.live.com(port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes