How to Add your Hotmail Account to Microsoft Outlook 2010

Microsoft Outlook 2010 is a premium and powerful email client software that is bundled in Microsoft Office Home and Business or the Professional version. It can also be purchased separately as a stand-alone program at $139.99 from the Microsoft Store website. It is mostly used in corporate companies that uses email as their main method to communicate with their clients. Other than able to send and receive email from POP3 email servers, it can also download the emails from Hotmail or Outlook.com through the MAPI protocol after installing the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector.

Many years ago, most web based email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo does not allow access from email clients unless they upgrade their account type to the paid subscription to enable POP3 and SMTP protocol for their account. Trying to access Hotmail from Outlook will prompt an error message saying “Access to Hotmail via Outlook or Outlook Express now requires a subscription. Please sign up at http://join.msn.com/general/Email“. The only way to remove this restriction is to subscribe to the Hotmail Plus which we had trouble cancelling the subscription at a later time. Thanks to Gmail for offering POP and IMAP services for free to their users, they created a competition where competitors such as Hotmail also started to allow email clients to access Hotmail.

Here is how to configure your Microsoft Outlook to download the emails from your Hotmail account.

1. First you need to download Microsoft Office Outlook Connector and install it on your computer.

2. Run Microsoft Outlook, click File > Info and click the Add Account button.

3. Make sure E-mail Account radio option button is selected, enter your name, hotmail address, password and click the Next button.

4. Microsoft Outlook will now try to automatically setup the server configuration. Once all you see all 3 steps being checked, click the Finish button.

5. Microsoft Outlook should automatically start synching your emails from Hotmail. If not, go to Send/Receive tab and click the Send/Receive All Folders button. Do note that your emails will still be available at Hotmail.com and not deleted after downloading to your Microsoft Outlook client.

For your information, Hotmail Plus is still available today at $19.95 a year and it offers the advantage of 10GB space that automatically grows with your needs, no account expiration and no graphical advertisements. Another advantage of subscribing to the Hotmail Plus is that you can always recover it back if your account ever gets hacked by providing your credit card information that used to subscribe.