Question :

I’ve just upgraded to OSX 10.9 Mavericks, and I’ve always though it was extremely annoying that Microsoft only allowed POP eMail for Hotmail.com for MacOSX, but I kept my Hotmail-account alive for al these years since I actually liked it, even after I switched to Mac…

Recently I heard that Microsoft is finally allowing IMAP access to Hotmail.com eMail, but I can’t figure out how to set it up on my OSX 10.9 Mavericks Mac…

Can you please help ?

Answer :

Yes, you’re correct : IMAP eMail has finally come to Hotmail.com, Live.com and Outlook.com eMail.

Since setting up Hotmail/Live/Outlook-eMail on iOS has been rather simple and painless, we were hoping that the introduction of OSX 10.9 Mavericks would bring this joy to MacOSX also…

note : instructions for setting-up Hotmail/Live/Outlook-eMail on iPhone/iPad can be found here.

…too bad however… for some reason this is still not integrated in OSX 10.9 Mavericks…

Even though OSX 10.9 Mavericks has some new features regarding Mail.app and setting up Internet Accounts, these won’t get you anything more useful than the previous instructions for setting-up Hotmail/Live/Outlook-eMail on MacOSX 10.7 Lion and OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion (which can be found here.).

Important note :

New to OSX 10.9 Mavericks are the iCould-synced Internet Accounts

…but in this case they’re NOT helpful, just adding more confusion :

In OSX Mail.app (version 7.0), in the “Mail” in the top menu, there is a listing named “Accounts” (right below “Preferences”) ; that will open up the “Internet Accounts”-window (which actually is in “System Preferences”), there you can set up a (regular/corporate) “Exchange”-eMail account, but it’s not compatible with Microsoft’s own “Outlook.com Exchange”, so you won’t be able to use it for setting up an IMAP-version of you Hotmail.com/Live.com/Outlook.com-eMail account…

So : let’s hope Apple will integrate easy-setup of Outook-IMAP in one of the future versions of OSX 10.9 Mavericks…

Good Luck !