Hotmail the most famous email service which Microsoft purchased for $400 million is finally seeing a turn of times, with the availability of POP3 access across the world. This was after they had made POP3 available in limited countries.

With POP3 support, users can now access Hotmail from practically anywhere without the need to install additional software like the previously needed Outlook Connector, including desktop clients like Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird, from smartphone devices that support accessing POP3 mails, and even from your Gmail account.

The POP3 Settings for Hotmail are:

POP server: pop3.live.com
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
SMTP server: smtp.live.com
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

However there is a small caveat in POP3, you will only be able to view emails from the Inbox folder, you will still need to access Hotmail service to access your personal folder emails, this however would be solved, if Hotmail moves to the more popular IMAP support, wishful thinking eh.