IzyMail

Setting up the iPhone for Hotmail

The following guide for configuring Hotmail for the iPhone through the Mac Mail application is based on original work of Melvin Rivera who had recently published an IMAP tutorial for converting an account from POP to IMAP.

Thanks, Melvin, for the great tutorial and the permission to use some of your material on our site.

Introduction

The iPhone comes with probably the best email application on a mobile device. The problem is that if I read and delete an email on the iPhone, when I get to my laptop I need to do it all over again because my email uses the POP email protocol. And this is cramping my style. With the POP protocol, email is downloaded from the server and stored on my computer. The most recent emails stay on the server usually for a week or two and that’s why multiple devices re-download the same emails. A more productive system is to use the IMAP email protocol. With IMAP, all email stays on the server. If you delete an email on the iPhone, it is deleted when I get to my computer. I only have to do things once and that’s the beauty of it.

In this tutorial I’m going to show how to set up a Hotmail / MSN/ Windows Live account with IzyMail. IMAP will allow you to check your email from work or some one else’s computer and have access to all of you email folders and sent emails. This is not for web services like Google or Hotmail, although as long as it supports IMAP it doesn’t really matter.

This example uses Apple’s Mail in Tiger. But, I believe IMAP was supported in Panther as well.

Step 0: Prerequisites and preparation

First of all, tidy up your Hotmail Inbox. The iPhone will only download about 200 messages and if your Hotmail Inbox is very full, IzyMail and the iPhone will still need to go through the other 7654 messages ;-(( to pick the right ones.

A mailbox with several thousand Inbox messages will definitely slow down the process. A simple way to clean up the Inbox is to move older messages to archive folders, for example by year, by quarter, or other criteria.

If you cannot bring the number of Inbox messages down to 200 - 500 messages, IMAP is not the right thing for you. Try a POP setup instead.

Secondly, please keep in mind that not all Hotmail accounts are equal. Features vary by domain name (...@hotmail.com vs. ...@msn.com vs. ...@live.com), age of the account, geographic region, etc. IzyMail handles most of the differences for you, but power users with several accounts may notice the tiny little differences here and there.

Step 1: Disable email checking

First disable email checking in ALL accounts so that there are no other processes happening while you set up Mail. From Apple’s Mail application menu go to ‘Mail > Preferences’ and select the Accounts tab. Go through each of your accounts and from the Advanced tab deselect “Include when automatically checking for new email”.

Next, select the plus sign at the bottom of the Accounts window to create a new account.

Step 2 Create a new Email Account

Enter a descriptive name for the account, name and email address:

• Account Type:
     POP: Quick and easy
     IMAP: For power users, possibly slooow.
•  
• Account Description:  My Hotmail account
• Full Name:  John D. Weisman
• Email Address:  johndw@hotmail.com

Enter the incoming server info for IzyMail:

• Incoming Mail Server:  in.izymail.com *
• User Name:  johndw@hotmail.com
• Password:  mysecretword

* Power tip: For best performance, use the
incoming server name iphone.izymail.com

Enter the outgoing mail server info as well:

• Outgoing Mail Server:  out.izymail.com

• User Name:  johndw@hotmail.com
• Password:  mysecretword

Mail will check the mail servers before creating the account. This process can take a few minutes.

Should you receive an error message stating that the outgoing server out.izymail.com cannot be found, you are probably affected by the infamous port 25 block.

Read our suggestions and advice here.

Step 3: Enable email checking

Next, go through each of your accounts and from the Advanced tab select “Include when automatically checking for new email”. Now close the Preferences window and from the to menu select ‘Mailbox > Synchronize All Accounts’. This step will synchronize your local emails with the server. This process will take a little while the first time you do it. 

Step 4: Sync iPhone and enjoy

Sync up your iPhone to transfer your new Mail account settings. When completed, unplug it and turn it on. From the iPhone, select the Mail application, select your email account and you will notice you now have all of your folders listed there. You might need to wait a little bit the first time as the phone synchronizes with the IMAP server. Tap on a folder to see the emails in them. Also, when reading an email in the inbox, tap the folder icon and you get the folder list where you can move the email to.

Keep in mind that IMAP is not as snappy as POP mail. But the slight delay, which is only noticeable when you first select a folder, is more than made up by the fact that you are always accessing your email directly whether it’s from your Mac, webmail or the iPhone. Also, iPhone shows a maximum of 200 emails per folder. So if you do need access to ALL of your emails, try doing sub-folders or just check your IMAP mail through a browser in the iPhone.

That’s all for now. Happy emailing…