How in the Tech

Sending and Receiving Hotmail Through Gmail

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 16, 2009 ⋅

I’ve written numerous times about my migration and love of Google Gmail. Like many, Gmail is my portal to all my email – it’s configured to send and receive email from just about all my accounts throughout my Internet history. I say just about because until the other day, Microsoft’s Hotmail could not be easily integrated within Gmail. You see, Gmail has a feature that allows it to POP – a technical term that simply means receive – email from any email provider that provides a POP-based access point. Unfortunately, the free Hotmail accounts were the lone hold out on offering POP access. That has now changed with Microsoft’s further attempts to be open and play nice within the industry. Here’s how we configure Gmail to send and receive email via your long-standing Hotmail address. Additionally, this method can be tailored to any POP provided if you know the correct server parameters.

1. From inside your Gmail account, navigate to Settings->Accounts and click Add a mail account you own.



2. Enter your Hotmail or Live email address.



3. Provide the account details including: username, password, POP server, and port. You also have a few optional options available such as leaving the messages on the hotmail server or applying a specific Gmail label. Set these as you see fit – they are not required however. When everything looks good click Add Account.



4. If all goes well you should see on the next screen that Your mail account has been added. Click the radio button next to Yes, I want to be able to send mail as .. and click Next Step.



5. Verify that your name and reply-to address are correct. You can either have your emails still show up as coming from your Hotmail address or any other address you own.



6. Now Google will send a verification email to your Hotmail address in order to ensure that you are the proper owner of the account. Click Send Verification.



7. Once you receive the verification email from Google, interestingly enough I found the email in my Deleted folder as if it were spam, type it in an click Verify.



8. Now when you go to compose a new email from within Gmail you have the ability to select which email address the message appears From. You will also see your Hotmail account has been added to the screen shot from Step 1. Remember, this isn’t limited to just Hotmail but any email account that provides a POP3 interface.