Hotmail is one of the oldest free email service providers, however the rules of free email has certainly been rewritten by Gmail, and many users now look forward to having POP3 and IMAP access for their emails.

Hotmail did have POP3 email access, however that was limited to premium users. Though free hotmail users can rejoice now as Microsoft has decided to provide POP3 access to free hotmail users in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. If you don’t see your country or region in this list, never fear, we’ll be rolling POP3 out to more parts of the world later this year.

If your account is in the countries listed above, you can access hotmail using POP3 by using the following settings.

POP server: pop3.live.com
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example [email protected]
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

If you are not in the countries that have POP3 access enabled right now you can still get Hotmail in Outlook by using the Outlook Connector, or by using Windows Live Mail.

A new ay to get Hotmail on your phone