For those of you born in the 80s a major part of our secondary school life was MSN messenger. It provided a free and easy way to chat to our friends outside of school as well as send small files (much like iChat but, unfortunately, most of us had Windows XP in those days!). As a result, despite owning a me.com address, I still have a number of websites and online stores that I use by Hotmail email account with. Additionally, as a proud owner of an Xbox 360, my Hotmail account is tied in to this without a simple and easy way to change it.
On an unrelated issue, I was troubleshooting the other half’s iCloud Mail service when I noticed a new icon in the ‘Add Account” option; add ‘Windows Live Hotmail” Account:
Previously, you could add a Hotmail Account in two ways:
- Exchange – This was more of a workaround then a fully supported method and often resulted in errors.
- POP – Seemed to work pretty well, but with all of the disadvantages of POP3.
Now with the new option, Hotmail accounts are added and set to use ‘ActiveSync’ allowing IMAP/Exchange-like features including folder syncing, email status syncing (‘unread’, ‘forwarded’, ‘replied’ etc) as well as contact, calendar and notes syncing, all without difficult setup procedures.
Configure Windows Live Hotmail using iOS 5.0
1.Open ‘Settings’. Click ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’ and click ‘Add Account’:
2. Click ‘Windows Live Hotmail’ and fill in your email address and password:
3. And hey presto, you’re good to go.