Use Windows Live Mail or Hotmail with Outlook 2007 or 2003

Now, you don’t need to have a Hotmail Plus account to use your free Windows Live Mail or Hotmail (or even MSN) e-mail account with either Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007. All you need to do is download and use Microsoft’s Outlook Connector to start taking advantage of your Hotmail account in Outlook.

Setting it up is pretty straight forward, and once you set it up, you’ll never have to log into your hotmail account again to see those annoying little ads and face the slow interface.

According to Microsoft, you can do the following with Outlook connector:

With Outlook Connector, you can use Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 to access and manage your Windows Live Hotmail or Office Live Mail accounts, including e-mail messages and contacts for free! Calendar, tasks and notes synchronization are not available on all services. If your service offers calendar synchronization, tasks and notes will synchronize as well. See the feature list for your service for details.
Outlook Connector enables you to use your Live Hotmail accounts within Outlook:

• Read and send your Office Live Mail/Windows Live Hotmail e-mail messages.
• Manage your Live Mail Contacts.
• Use advanced options for blocking junk e-mail messages.
• Manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place.

With a paid subscription, Outlook Connector enables these additional features:

• Manage, share, and synchronize your calendar in Hotmail from Outlook.
• Access your Tasks and Notes.

Not bad for a free e-mail account. However, there are a few things that I don’t like about this outlook connector thing. What it does essentially is pair up your hotmail and your other POP accounts together if you have more than one account (may be there is an option to turn this off… but I haven’t yet discovered this). So if you receive an e-mail in your POP account inbox, Outlook Connector will automatically upload a copy of the e-mail to your hotmail account. This of course is rather annoying for a person like me who likes to stay organized…

Speaking of staying organized, more on that coming soon. I feel as though I have way to many e-mail accounts and operating systems containing bits and pieces of my work here and there that I need to somehow come up with the ‘ULTIMATE’ solution to reduce the time I spend finding my stuff and sending a little e-mail.