About Hotmail Email and Connecting to Outlook

Hotmail email is a web-based system that was launched in 1996 and the company was acquired by Microsoft in 1997. When you consider that the Hotmail system has been in existence for so long, is backed by Microsoft, and is free (at least the basic version that the vast majority of people use) it should be no surprise that Hotmail has tens of millions of users.

As of January 2006, most users of the free Hotmail service got a 25MB Inbox (increasing to 250MB within 30 days of activation) with spam and anti-virus protection, along with the ability to send and receive attachments as large as 10MB.

You can customize your messages with backgrounds, fonts, emoticons (smileys). The messages are created in Rich Text Format, which both Hotmail and Outlook understand, so messages created in Hotmail look the same to Outlook users and vice versa (if the Outlook user creates their messages in the default Rich Text Format).

Why Use Hotmail Email with Outlook

Using Hotmail and Outlook together offers some real advantages, particularly if you travel a lot. Because you can get a Hotmail account independently of your job or your regular Internet Service Provider, they can be good personal mail accounts.

By creating a Hotmail Microsoft Outlook connection, you can deal with your work and personal mail in the same place, which is much more convenient than using separate programs for each type.

Even better, when you configure Outlook and Hotmail to work together, Outlook automatically creates a separate set of folders for Hotmail, so you don't have to worry about your personal stuff getting mixed up with your work stuff. The two play well together, so the folders you create in the Hotmail section of Outlook get recreated on the web side of Hotmail, and folders you create on the web get recreated in Outlook. Delete a message in one, it gets deleted in the other the next time they connect. Move something in one, create a folder, do whatever in one, and the changes carry over to the other.

This makes a Hotmail account very useful if you travel and don't carry Outlook along with you on a notebook computer. You can work with your Hotmail account from any computer connected to the Internet, anywhere in the world, and know that when you get home, the changes will end up in Outlook automatically.

Compare this to other web-based mail services that you can connect to Outlook. They don't have the tight integration that Hotmail email has with Outlook, so you have to do a lot of manual work to keep the web side and the Outlook side coordinated.

The Hotmail Outlook connection really is a better way to do web-based mail.

The Catch

The catch is that you cannot connect the free version of Hotmail to Outlook. To connect Hotmail and Outlook, you need to upgrade from the free version of Hotmail to one of the paid versions.

Hotmail Plus is a good choice for most people, and as of January 2006, cost only $19.95 a year. In addition to the ability to connect to Outlook, Hotmail Plus gives you 2GB (2 gigabytes, approximately 2 billion bytes) of storage, and the ability to have attachments as large as 20MB. It really is a pretty good deal.

Connecting Hotmail Email to Outlook

Connecting Hotmail Email to Outlook isn't hard, but there are a number of steps to the process. If you're interested in giving this a try, I suggest you go to the main Living With Outlook Hotmail Email page. There you'll be able to read through what you need to do, and follow the procedure to get the job done as quickly and easily as possible.

That's the basic story on Hotmail and Outlook. From here you can:

Go to the Living With Outlook Hotmail Email page.
Go to the Mail Accounts page.
Go to the Living With Outlook Home page.