Re: Outlook Express/Hotmail mail setup questions and general use quest
- From: "N. Miller" <anonymous@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:37:25 -0700
On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 20:59:01 -0700, keltraine wrote:
Hey all (and mostly to the OE MVPs whom I'm hoping can help me with my query),
I'm looking for some expert guidance here and I seem to have a more basic
question than a lot of sites address:
What I'm wondering is how to maximize my efficiency with my personal email
account. What I'm looking for is the ability to basically get a personal
email account working pretty much like I have it with my corporate work email
account and Outlook (2003). I'm currently using Outlook Express 6 and free
Hotmail access through HTTP (and have been for like 5 years) and have a
couple specific questions about that:
1) I guess I was using OE to access Hotmail through HTTP from before they
stopped that for new Hotmail accounts. What I'm wondering is whether there's
a known date before WebDAV (HTTP) access will be cut off for OE--that's never
been clear from the postings I could find on the internet?
Yes, and it is well past now. If you did not set up a Hotmail account to
use MS Outlook/Outlook Express for access _before_ Sept. 26, 2004, it is
too late to do so now. You will have to pay $19.95 per year for a
Hotmail Plus account for access.
And if so, does anyone know whether I will still be able to POP to my account
for free since it' a legacy and "valued" account or will I need to go to
Hotmail Plus for that? Thinking of trying to setup POP now but don't want to
screw anything up, so info on that before I try it would be good.
How long have you had this account? Hotmail has not had POP3 access
since before some time in 1999. That is when I set up my oldest Hotmail
account, and I never had POP3 access for that account.
2) My biggest issue seems to be that I want functionality I can't get with
my current setup (so I want to know if this assertion is correct or not).
What I mean is that with my coporate setup I have 2 months worth of mail that
stays on the server and that is available to me in an .ost so I can access it
offline and whenever I connect those changes are synchronized; this is true
for all folders under my inbox that my mail is sorted into (oh, I should
mention I only check work mail from my work laptop and I travel a lot, hence
the need for offline access with both work email and personal email). Then
after the 2 months, all the mail is auto-archived (I didn't used to have to
do this but they put size restrictions on our accounts b/c the Exchange
server was choking and since mine was at 10GB, it kinda made sense! ;P) and
put into a couple different .psts to store it, which I have open in Outlook.
Now there doesn't seem to be any way to really do that with a Hotmail
account, at least the ways you can setup access to Hotmail, no? It doesn't
support MAPI (like Outlook), nor IMAP, which seems like it'd be the closest
analogue. If I was able to POP to it and I left messages on the server,
they'd all be unsorted on the server and I like sorting them into folders to
better organize them. And what I do now is HTTP access which does sync and
act kinda like IMAP but the problem there is that I run into my next
question...
MAPI and IMAP are not analogous, that I can see. MAPI seems to be used
to move a message from an application, such as MS Word, into a mail
client in order to _send_ email. IMAP is a server-side email storage
system where a client, such as MS Outlook Express can access stored
email without have to down load it. I just don't see the analogue. IMAP
is more like HTTPMail than anything else that I know.
3) One thing I like about my corpotate setup with Outlook is the ability to
apply rules (an unlimited number) to incoming messages so they can all be
nicely sorted into folders. Currently my free Hotmail account only allows 15
rules for incoming messages. That's enough for all the newsgroups I'm sub'ed
to but not all the event lists and travel and shopping sites, etc that I get
mail from. I really prefer to keep things simple and like using just one
email account (I don't get much spam to this one despite being registered on
all these sites) and if I could just get enough filters to catch all those
different domains, that would help a lot with managing my email.
The problem is, even Hotmail Plus (which I was considering upgrading to)
only supports 36 filters, and that's like half of what I need for proper
online filtering. So that won't be enough.
MS Outlook Express can't filter IMAP, or HTTPMail accounts. Filtering
has to be done on the server. Which means you live within the server
filter limitations.
4) So maybe my solution is to give up access to messages on the server and
just download everything locally? In that case OE has rules that you can
apply and those should be unlimited right? So I would get rid of my online
rules and just leave everything in my inbox and once I dl it through OE, it'd
apply it's filters and sort into the 70 or so folders I currently have?
MSOE filters are _not_ unlimited. They can filter on the following
fields: "Subject:", "From:", "To:", or "Cc:". Also body content, but you
have to download for that.
Filtering on the presence of attachments, or message size, and a couple
of other attributes are not so useful as spam filters.
In any case, MSOE doesn't filter IMAP, or HTTPMail.
5) The only issue with that is now I'm trying to set up access to my
personal email (finally) through a mobile device. I want to be able to read
my email and get it real time and not have to have my laptop and OE with
me--get the messages as they come in. Without listing out all the
permutations here and knowing what I've asked above, what's the best way to
do that?
IMAP, or HTTPMail; if you want the email left on the server for laptop
access. I am not really sure I understand your requirements for Item 5,
though.
6) Finally, Ihave to ask this even though this is the OE newsgroup--is there
a better email client for what I'm trying to do? What if I go POP and try
and dl my messages and filter them? I used to use Pine on a UNIX server back
when I was in college and could try PC-Pine or Eudora or other things if
anyone has any recommendations to that effect.
I like Pegasus Mail. It is somewhat quirky, if you are used to MS
Outlook Express. But MSOE would be quirky to somebody who only ever used
Pegasus Mail.
http://www.pmail.com/overviews/ovw_winpmail.htm
Or you can give Mozilla Thunderbird a shot:
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
And even going one step further, if Hotmail isn't the best email account to
do this in, maybe would it make sense to switch to gmail (I have multiple
gmail accounts) and leave messages on the server there and POP from that and
that would work for OE or whatever program I use to check mail on my laptop,
and allow me to POP to whatever mobile device I decide to use?
For client access, with offline access, GMail is better as a free
service. It doesn't have IMAP access, that I know of. You might still be
able to get free IMAP access from Fastmail:
http://www.fastmail.fm/
You can't use the SMTP servers with a free fastmail account, though. I
have not tried this with my Fastmail account, but the free account
claims to allow POP/Hotmail access. So you could use your GMail account
in conjunction with your Fastmail account for IMAP mail access. You have
to configure GMail to permit sending with your Fastmail access, but
GMail does allow that.
As you can see, this is a pretty broad topic and there's a lot of stuff in
there. If you've made it this far, THANK YOU, and any answers to the
specific questions and any insight into my more general dilemma/questions
would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all again.
I just hope that my answers actually made sense. You are welcome.
--
Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum
.
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