Hotmail/Outlook Replacement

[skodanorman]

Good morning Lady & Gents.

 

I am a long-standing user of Hotmail and latterly their web-based Outlook. Over the last 12 months they have made a series of changes which have detracted from the usability bit by bit cumulating in removing the ability to link accounts. I have 4 accounts I regularly swap between and now I am having to sign out, and then sign in again each time. What a PITA. If my phone is able to swap between them, why can't Outlook? They do say you can set it up so your emails are all forwarded to one account and you can then reply from there but I don't want to do that as its a faff and each email account is for specific uses. 

 

Aside from a well needed rant which I'm sure will ring true with any other Hotmail users out there, I was wondering if there is any "mail clients" (I think they're called) out there that will allow me to link accounts and jump between them without having to renter password details each time. Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

Thanks. 

[sheldon_cz]

Try Evolution. It's free and open source. http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/E-mail-Clients/Evolution-for-Windows.shtml

[KBPhoto]

I'd avoid Thunderbird, nothing but trouble I've had with it.

Are your email accounts IMAP (as opposed to POP3)?

This will allow emails to remain on the server (so accessible via web based methods) as well as drawn together into one mail client on your computer(s).

[NXPete]

i set up email forwarding and now all 3 of my hotmail accounts automatically send their email forward to my g-mail account, OK way of doing things if you don't mind everything ending up in one place (gmail has a tool that will automatically negotiate and transfer your mail across)

 

Pete

[KBPhoto]

If you did that I guess you could set up 'rules' in the mail client to filter mail into specific folders.

But there would be a lot of work and certain emails are bound to be missed.

[skodanorman]

If you do the forwarding as NXPete mentiosns there, and then reply to an email that has been forwarded from your previous address... is the email sent from your gmail account for example, or from the address from where it was forwarded from?

 

KBPhoto, I don't know about the POP3 / IMAP. How would I know?

[KBPhoto]

Look online at the help / support sections of your email providers website. Many ISP's support IMAP but some still won't (Orange / EE for example).

IMAP is not essential for what you describe, but I am able to access all my emails from several IMAP accounts on my phone, desktop & laptop computer and changes on one are automatically reflected on the others (via the host servers).

[Scribbler]

I would ditch hotmail and buy a domain name of your choosing lets say for arguements sake skodanorman (about £8 for two years) get some webspace hosting for free or very cheap thesedays and you can then have a number of accounts at the same domain address (example [email protected]). Some providers will even redirect your email from previous accounts to your new domain. There are many options that you can configure yourself rather than having to rely on microsoft for a system they are constantly altering to copy google / apple and making it worse. You can access via webmail or an email client on your PC / mobile device.

[KBPhoto]

That's a good idea!

It's also what I do.

[bluebobx]

If you do the forwarding as NXPete mentiosns there, and then reply to an email that has been forwarded from your previous address... is the email sent from your gmail account for example, or from the address from where it was forwarded from?

 

KBPhoto, I don't know about the POP3 / IMAP. How would I know?

Hotmail/Outlook is definitely POP3/SMTP only - which imho in these days is a complete crock. 

 

Phone mail clients I can't comment on - I was pretty happy with the Hotmail client on Android, but when they MUI'd it to make the Outlook client I really wasn't happy. General email clients are easily findable, but K9Mail seems to get some love in a lot of places.

 

KBPhoto: I've been a longtime Thunderbird user (with Hotmail) and it works fine for me - both on Windows (yuk) and Linux. I use Linux most of the time as my desktop (Windows is my gaming PC) so Outlook is a non starter. Plus I got Outlook as my work/office email client so after seven hours of that crap I really don't want to see it on my own PC. My copies of Thunderbird are running the WebMail and WebMail-Hotmail add-ons and once it's configured it seems to work fine for me.

 

To be honest I had some bad experiences with "free" mail systems - with some of them (cough, cough, Yahoo) seeming to have an awful lot of spam turning up within a few days of registration. So I ended up buying a domain hosting package, which coincidentally gave me 1000 email addresses I can use. That's probably overkill for most people but if you check online you'll find a lot of ISP's offering email-only services, typically for less than £40 a year for multiple email addresses.

 

Not that I'm necessarily giving it a recommendation, but according to the bumf I got from my ISP, they do a mail hosting package that gives you 5 distinct accounts with 150 aliases and 2GB of mail space for about 70p a month - very affordable in my book. Great thing about this is that it's IMAP, so you have a shared mailbox that you can use from any client. e.g. I can read a mail on my phone, compose a reply on my linux pc, and then move that message to archive on my windows pc - and all three mail clients will see the changes. I'm now in the process of moving my Hotmail messages - once read - to my IMAP'd space, (assuming that I don't want to delete them of course).

 

IMAP space is definitely the way to go - shared mailbox accessible by what means you want to use - desktop email client, mobile email client, or even web browser. Email aliases are good too - means you can generate ones for systems where you think you'll be spammed and if it gets too much just delete the alias, (which is effectively the same as the email address being discontinued).

 

Only thing I will say though - based on what I've heard from friends etc - is avoid GoDaddy. I've heard too many tales of bad service to be comfortable giving them any business.

[KBPhoto]

I can only comment on my experiences with Thunderbird and they were not good for several reasons that aren't really relevant to this discussion.

I can recommend Host Papa though. Unlimited storage, more than enough email addresses, reliable and cheap enough (c.£75 per annum).

They do offer IMAP and I've used various mail applications and devices to access mail through that.

[zei20t]

Hotmail/Outlook/Live all support Exchange ActiveSync - That's the 'push' protocol your phone uses.

Get a copy of Outlook, add all accounts there. Problem solved. Can even reply with whatever account you want, or the one that received the email. The mail client that comes with Windows 8 works perfectly fine, if you have that.

IMAP and POP are 'old' technology, and don't support push for instant notification of emails.

[Ade VRS]

I have several Hotmail accounts too as well as the Wife's ones also. We use Windows Live Mail, part of Windows Essentials.

All our accounts are managed with this one application, makes it so much easier. Very easy to use too.

You can download for free here - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-live/essentials-other#essentials=overviewother

[bluebobx]

I can only comment on my experiences with Thunderbird and they were not good for several reasons that aren't really relevant to this discussion.

I can recommend Host Papa though. Unlimited storage, more than enough email addresses, reliable and cheap enough (c.£75 per annum).

They do offer IMAP and I've used various mail applications and devices to access mail through that.

I did say that Thunderbird worked fine for me, although the fact that Mozilla have stopped actively supporting it (because they want to do that damned stupid phone OS instead) is a bit of a pain.

 

Hadn't come across Host Papa before, might be worth looking at when domain renewals come up! At the moment I'm using 1&1 and they've been pretty solid - only downside is that they usual the annual renewals as an opportunity to do upsells on opt-out. Then again FastHosts and Rackspace I've heard good comments about.

 

Hotmail/Outlook/Live all support Exchange ActiveSync - That's the 'push' protocol your phone uses. Get a copy of Outlook, add all accounts there. Problem solved. Can even reply with whatever account you want, or the one that received the email. The mail client that comes with Windows 8 works perfectly fine, if you have that. IMAP and POP are 'old' technology, and don't support push for instant notification of emails.

Problem is that ActiveSync does more than just mail, and it's a proprietary protocol - although granted one with wide support. IMAP on the other hand is an open standard, so you're not at the whim of any protocol owner, and it's fully supported on just about any desktop/mobile OS. So if the OP doesn't need shared task and calendar (and you can easily do the latter via a free account like GMail), then IMAP will definitely be a more flexible solution imho.

 

On the other hand if shared calendar and/or tasks is nice to have then there's some pretty decent deals available on Exchange hosting - funnily enough all around the £7/month mark.

[sheldon_cz]

Hotmail/Outlook/Live all support Exchange ActiveSync - That's the 'push' protocol your phone uses. Get a copy of Outlook, add all accounts there. Problem solved. Can even reply with whatever account you want, or the one that received the email. The mail client that comes with Windows 8 works perfectly fine, if you have that. IMAP and POP are 'old' technology, and don't support push for instant notification of emails.

I don't think 'old' is accurate. They simply don't support that functionality.

If you do the forwarding as NXPete mentiosns there, and then reply to an email that has been forwarded from your previous address... is the email sent from your gmail account for example, or from the address from where it was forwarded from?

 

KBPhoto, I don't know about the POP3 / IMAP. How would I know?

Generally speaking, the e-mail is from the new address. Certain e-mail hosts run applications that allow you "impersonate" the original server, so the mail is sent from the old address (Google does that in Google Apps, but those aren't free any more. And I think that any host that uses IceWarp as the web application provides that, but I'm not entirely sure about that).

Ad POP3/IMAP: That is the method of checking out the e-mails from the server. If you have folders on the server (i. e. they are synchronized across all clients), you have IMAP. If not, there's a good chance you have POP3.

[zei20t]

I don't think 'old' is accurate. They simply don't support that functionality.

 

Actually they are old, which is why they don't support that functionality. email was never supposed to be used for what it is actually used for today.