Using Thunderbird to access Hotmail

Draeconis

Draeconis

Draeconis

Associate
Joined
28 Feb 2008
Posts
185
I've had an email account with Hotmail for about 9 years, so I can access my account remotely through Outlook Express/Outlook for free.

I've recently decided to totally remove Office from my system and migrate to OpenOffice, which is cool, but it doesn't come with an alternative for Outlook.

So I went straight to Mozilla and downloaded Thunderbird, hoping that would be a good alternative.

After failing to get it working initially, I found out through Googling about a bit that you have to install these two extentions;

http://webmail.mozdev.org/installation.html

Web-Mail-1.3.1 and Hotmail-1.2.14.

so having installed them, creating a new account actually works, and Thunderbird started downloading my mail! Woo!

But then.. after downloading about 40-50 or so, it stops. It's also downloaded everything into one folder (Inbox) though apparently that's what Thunderbird does with Hotmail anyway.

Then it says 'Connection to server localhost timed out'

I sifted through the emails I wanted and didn't want, organised a few folders, deleted most and then tried to reconnect. It did log me in, indicates in the bottom left that it's downloading 1 of 359 emails, then that just disappears, and then gives me the time out message again.

I've been using open source software like Firefox for years, so I don't understand why Thunderbird doesn't work as flawlessly as Firefox does.

Thunderbird just won't download any more mail, no matter what I do.
 
I also found this with Thunderbird ages ago. It'll start to download email but after a while it gives up and gives that localhost error message.

The only thing I can suggest is to either re-install Outlook from your Office CDs or setup a Gmail account and have the Hotmail forwarded to that if you can. Then run the Gmail from Thunderbird.

Would you like this in Windows? I think you've put it in Linux/Open source because of Thunderbird?
 
Yeah I mentioned it in here because of Thunderbird, as it is Open Source Software after all, it's pretty platform independent. I've solved the issue another way by downloading Digsby, and now I can check 3 Email accounts, 2 MySpace accounts, 1 Facebook account and be logged in to MSN all through one app :)

Currently Digsby is Windows only, but it's being written for OS X and Linux as we speak.
 
Thunderbird is unbelievably buggy. Few of our product support emails on IMAP server have to be checked few times a week, 70-100,000 emails, mostly spam every couple of days. We usually do it from Linux box or restricted XP box, just in case there was something nasty there. No anti virus software to slow it down, etc. Obviously Thunderbird is the poison of choice - being free, and cross platform. However, both under linux and windows, it simply can not cope. Spam filers just stop working after few hundred emails and never delete junk mail from the inbox, choosing "delete junk" from menu on few thousands of emails will just freeze it completely and leak to memory until it hits 2Gb and collapses. Rules stop working at random, sometimes you spend half a day deleting stuff by hand then press purge, just to see inbox being filled up with the same stuff again, instead of deleting mail from IMAP. Search is a complete random tool too, gives you few hundred hits, you delete them just to discover you can search for the same phrase again and it will give you another few hundred hits ad hoc. It's just so amateurish and horrible . But to be honest sylpheed, evolution or kMail is even worse to work with.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom