Some time ago I received an email from (I think) MSN saying that Outlook
Express, which I have long been using quite happily for all email, would no
longer handle web-based mail. This is from memory - I can't be certain
exactly what the message said because of other computer problems (I am now
running on my laptop while my desktop s away being worked on, and I haven't
tried to instal my backed-up OE files on this rather restricted laptop).

This seems like the right time to change to Outlook as my email engine, but
I have (at least!) one concern. I possess no other email address besides my
MSN hotmail one. Will Outlook 2002 cope with that? Or should I be
contacting my ISP for new email address(es)?

John Jeffrey wrote:

Some time ago I received an email from (I think) MSN saying that Outlook
Express, which I have long been using quite happily for all email, would no
longer handle web-based mail. This is from memory - I can't be certain
exactly what the message said because of other computer problems (I am now
running on my laptop while my desktop s away being worked on, and I haven't
tried to instal my backed-up OE files on this rather restricted laptop).

This seems like the right time to change to Outlook as my email engine, but
I have (at least!) one concern. I possess no other email address besides my
MSN hotmail one. Will Outlook 2002 cope with that? Or should I be
contacting my ISP for new email address(es)?

You cannot use plain-vanilla Outlook to connect to free Hotmail
accounts. WebDAV access to free Hotmail accounts was discontinued back
in November 2004. WebDAV is the scripting language used by Outlook and
Outlook Express to talk to Microsoft's HTTP servers (Hotmail). You need
a paid Hotmail account to use Outlook without the help of plug-ins;
otherwise, you are stuck using the webmail interface to Hotmail.

WebDAV was considered insecure so Microsoft came up with another
protocol call DeltaSync (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeltaSync) to
communicate with their HTTP servers but Outlook does not support it yet.
Windows Live Mail does support the new protocol but is much more like
Outlook Express than Outlook. In Outlook, you can get support for
DeltaSync by installing the Outlook Connector plug-in. It is available
from Microsoft's download web site (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads;
search on "outlook connector"). After you install the plug-in, you will
need to use that plug-in to create an account in Outlook to access your
new free Hotmail account.

The Outlook Connector plug-in is only supported in Outlook 2003 & 2007.
If you have an old MSN Hotmail account, you will need to convert it to a
Hotmail Live account (your e-mail address remains the same).

If you are using a free Hotmail account, presumably you also want a free
solution to access it. Although the connector add-on is free, Outlook
costs money. Windows Live Mail (very similar in behavior to Outlook
Express) is free - but it handles each account as a separate message
store instead of combining them as in Outlook Express, so you will need
to adapt to the behavior change and probably also have to modify your
rules, especially if you want their scope to remain within a particular
account rather than across all of them. Rather than use a database as
in Outlook Express, WLM uses separate folders and files on your hard
drive using poorly constructed names, slows WLM when the number of
messages is large, severely slows searching (which must be done by
scanning files rather than a database query), and has some other
usability problems but WLM is the only free choice right now to access
Windows Live Mail accounts because it supports Deltasync. Well, another
possible free choice is to use FreePOPs as a local POP-to-HTTP mail
proxy to access your Hotmail account using any POP-compliant e-mail
client, like Outlook Express and others, providing they updated their
Hotmail module to support Windows Live Hotmail for both the Classic and
Full interfaces.

Microsoft was going to disable WebDAV on Windows Live Hotmail accounts
as of June 30, 2008. That might have been postponed so you may still be
able to access your account using Outlook (with no connector add-on) or
Outlook Express still using the old DAV protocol; however, postponed
merely means it will come later so you might want to determine how you
will handle the eventual change to Deltasync.