Question :

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 Mac…

Can you please help ?

Answer :

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

Setting it up in MacOSX is not as straight forward as one might have hoped however…

The tricky part is that MacOSX will automatically set-up a POP-account if you are setting up a new account in Mail.app using a Hotmail.com, Live.com or Outlook.com eMail-address.

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

That being said…

If you follow these steps, you will be able to succeed anyway :

( if you are on OSX 10.9 Mavericks, read this first )

1- in OSX Mail.app, go to Preferences, then to Accounts and (if you have one) select your current POP-setup for Hotmail/Live/Outlook from the list, then go to the Account Information tab, and there un-check the “Enable this account” option

2- then use the Plus-button (bottom left) to add a new account

3- in the pulldown-window “Add Account” that appears, fill in your Full Name, type a fake eMail address ( e.g. nobody@blabla.com ) and leave the Password blank, then click on Create

4- in the next window, set the Account Type to “Exchange IMAP” (only if you don’t have that option choose “IMAP”) and use the following info, depending on what eMail-address you have :

for Hotmail.com-eMail, use :

Description : Hotmail IMAP ( or if you perfer your eMail-address, make sure to add “IMAP” or something like that to it, else it will conflict with your previously set-up Hotmail POP )

Incoming Mail Server : imap-mail.outlook.com [ will automatically select Port 993 ]

User Name : username@hotmail.com [ replace “username” by your own username ]

Password : ••••• [ your Hotmail-password ]

Outlook Web Access Server : m.hotmail.com

for Live.com-eMail, use :

Description : Live.com IMAP ( or if you perfer your eMail-address, make sure to add “IMAP” or something like that to it, else it will conflict with your previously set-up Live.com POP )

Incoming Mail Server : imap-mail.outlook.com [ will automatically select Port 993 ]

User Name : username@live.com [ replace “username” by your own username ]

Password : ••••• [ your Live.com-password ]

Outlook Web Access Server : m.live.com

for Outlook.com-eMail, use :

Description : Outlook IMAP ( or if you perfer your eMail-address, make sure to add “IMAP” or something like that to it, else it will conflict with your previously set-up Live.com POP )

Incoming Mail Server : imap-mail.outlook.com [ will automatically select Port 993 ]

User Name : username@outlook.com [ replace “username” by your own username ]

Password : ••••• [ your Outlook.com-password ]

Outlook Web Access Server : m.outlook.com

5- then click “Continue”, and if you get an error-message, just click “Continue” again

6- in the next window put a check-mark in front of “Use SSL”, set Authentication to “Password” and click “Continue” again

7- in the next window, use these settings :

for Hotmail.com-eMail, use :

Description : Hotmail SMTP ( or anything you like )

Outgoing Mail Server : smtp.live.com [ will automatically select Port 25 or Port 465 ]

you can check “Use only this server”, but it’s not obligatory

do check “Use Authentication”

User Name : username@hotmail.com [ replace “username” by your own username ]

Password : ••••• [ your Hotmail.com-password ]

for Live.com-eMail, use :

Description : Live.com SMTP ( or anything you like )

Outgoing Mail Server : smtp.live.com [ will automatically select Port 25 or Port 465 ]

you can check “Use only this server”, but it’s not obligatory

do check “Use Authentication”

User Name : username@live.com [ replace “username” by your own username ]

Password : ••••• [ your Live.com-password ]

for Outlook.com-eMail, use :

Description : Outlook SMTP ( or anything you like )

Outgoing Mail Server : smtp-mail.outlook.com [ will automatically select Port 587 ]

you can check “Use only this server, but it’s not obligatory

do check “Use Authentication”

User Name : username@outlook.com [ replace “username” by your own username ]

Password : ••••• [ your Outlook.com-password ]

8- then click “Continue” and if you get an error message, just click “Continue” again

9- in the next window, put a check-mark at “Use SSL”, select Authentication “Password” ( or “External (TSL client Certificate)” if you happen to have that ), and click “Continue”

10- in the next window, put a check-mark at “Take account online” and click on “Create”

11- then, back in Mail.app’s Prefecences, under Accounts, select your newly created eMail-account and click on the “Account Information”-tab and re-type your correct eMail-address in “Email Address:” (replacing the nobody@blabla.com you had originally entered) and check if all settings are as they need to be according to the above

12- then exit the Mail.app Prefecences (click the red button upper left) and click “Save” when the “Save changes” pulldown window appears

13- now, back in Mail.app itself (if you do not see the normal Mail window, go to File –> New Viewer Window), you will see the new Hotmail/Live/Outlook account has appeared, and it is looking for your old & new eMails on the Hotmail/Live/Outlook-mail servers

…most people will have lots of old eMails to import, so this might take some time (don’t be surprised if this takes 15, 20 or maybe even 30 minutes…)

14- if the import of the old & new eMails from the Hotmail/Live/Outlook-mail servers is complete, they will appear in the Inbox window and you’re done…

Congratulations !

…if you do not see your old & new eMails appearing, but you do see an “Unread eMails”-number next to the name of the Hotmail/Live/Outlook-inbox in the listing on the left, you have run into a bug in Mail.app that was only recently solved in OSX 10.8.5

to manually solve this problem, quit Mail.app, open Disk Utility (from the Applications –> Utilities folder), run “Repair Disk Permissions” on your Hard Drive’s main partition and when that’s finished, re-open Mail.app and all should be solved

Enjoy !