I had a client a couple of weeks ago that could not access her Hotmail account through Windows Mail. I was instantly thrilled she wasn’t using Outlook Express. I quickly moved past that thought, and it occurred to me that Microsoft had released ‘Windows Live Mail’. I wasn’t sure what the difference was, so I decided to find out. Turns out, Windows Live Mail *does* support Hotmail. Ok, that by itself is just confusing!

Microsoft includes a free programs in Windows Vista called ‘Windows Mail’, which is the successor to Outlook Express. All in all, a simple, but usable program. The trouble is, it doesn’t support Microsoft’s own Hotmail.com. Yes, really. It does, however, import mail and settings from Outlook Express quite nicely. That topic is for an entirely different post altogether, though.

Despite the incredibly similar name, you can download Windows Live Mail from the Microsoft website, for free. It’s included in the Windows Live installer, which allows you to download one or all of Microsoft’s ‘Live’ products at once. Convenient, but be sure to uncheck anything you don’t want. No point having stuff on your system you’ll never use.

Once you download and install Windows Live Mail, start it up, use the import/export feature (under ‘File), and your emails and contacts will magically appear. Under the ‘Tools’ menu, choose ‘Accounts’, then click ‘Add’, then ‘E-Mail Account’.

Put in the basic information, and click ‘manually configure server settings for email account’, and put in your Hotmail account information, and be sure to change the server settings to ‘http’. Once the account is linked to it, close the wizard, and click ‘send/receive’.

If it asks you for your password, check ‘always remember’, enter your password, and click ‘ok’.

This process is obviously much more complicated than it needs to be, and for that, you can thank Microsoft. They don’t make it apparent anywhere that Hotmail will only connect to Windows Live Mail, and not Windows Mail. Also, why name both programs almost the same thing? That’s just confusing!

Why have two separate programs anyway? They’re both free!!

Geeks like me are happy to help people with these sort of problems, but honestly, it would be nice if the companies that made the products could make things a lot easier to understand. That would make our jobs a lot easier.