Dave said:
Ever since Windows changed over to LIVE
Windows doesn't "change" over to Live. Live is a set of *services*
provided by Microsoft for which some of them involve supporting
software, like Windows Live Mail as an *optional* e-mail client to
access ANY e-mail account (via POP/IMAP/Deltasync/SMTP access methods).
my Hotmail has been a disaster using Outlook.
If you are using the Office Outlook Connector add-on to provide
Deltasync access to your Hotmail account (because it gives IMAP-like
access) then expect some flakiness. That add-on was in beta status for
a long time. That they removed "beta" from the product's title doesn't
really seem to be appropriate yet as many users of that add-on report
problems when using it. My personal opinion is that the add-on sucks
for reliability (and that Deltasync was an exercise rather than a
long-term [30+ year] solution). While you get some advantages with the
add-on, like IMAP-like access, you also get some disadvantages, like
rules won't run automatically against newly received e-mails in HTTP
accounts defined in Outlook (
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892455).
If you want to use rules, you'll have to use the lame rules set provided
in the webmail interface (i.e., server-side rules). Also read
http://www.msoutlook.info/question/332.
If you don't need IMAP-like access to your Hotmail accounts then use POP
to access your Hotmail account. POP is a well established access method
(and not a Microsoft proprietary protocol) to access e-mail accounts and
takes less resources than either Deltasync or IMAP.
However, moving to POP won't suddenly make the Hotmail *service* more
reliable. Microsoft appears not to have allocated enough resources to
handle all the concurrent logins. Often your e-mail client will error
trying to connect to your Hotmail account because their mail servers are
just too busy. Since POP only has two status codes (+OK and -ERR),
e-mail clients really don't know the cause of the error (but can guess
based on when the -ERR status code is issued). However, if the -ERR
status is returned when trying to establish a mail session, the e-mail
client doesn't know if the server rejected the connection because it was
too busy, there is a problem with the mail server, or the authentication
failed. So e-mail clients guess that the login credentials were wrong
which isn't necessarily true. So whether you use POP or Deltasync to
access your Hotmail account, and regardless of whether it is a free or
paid Hotmail account (they don't use separate servers between those type
of accounts), expect Hotmail to have more login problems that you will
encounter with other e-mail providers.
I am not using one of the free Hotmail accounts, I am paying an annual
fee for the increased storage capacity.
I don't see that Microsoft uses a different farm of mail servers to
handle paid accounts versus free accounts. You are competing with all
the freeloaders (I'm one of them, too) trying to access the same mail
server (frontend) as are you.
Now I am not able to download my Junk Mail using Outlook 2003. I seem to be
able to download my Inbox after I made the necessary changes to suit the new
revised "live" requirements in my Outlook account set up for Hotlmail.
Looks like we are to guess that you are using Deltasync to access your
Hotmail account which means you must be using the Outlook Connector
add-on to give you IMAP-like access to server-side folders in your
mailbox other than just the Inbox folder (which is all that POP will
access).
You need to define an e-mail account in Outlook that utilizes the add-on
to manage the Deltasync-accessed Hotmail account. If you use POP to
access Hotmail, you only get access to the Inbox folder.
My Outlook folder listing for Junk Mail has a red circle and a red cross
thru it and it is not downloading or even being recognized by Outlook.
Has anyone out there seen this before and been successful in fixing the
problem ?
I also have Outlook 2003 but stuck with POP access to my free Hotmail
account. I still get the login errors that occur far too often with
Microsoft's e-mail service but I doubt a paid account is going to
resolve that problem (the same mail server frontend gets used for free
and paid accounts). After 2 months of trialing the add-on, dependency
on retention times established by the webmail interface rather than
those defined in Outlook, loss of rules, and other features, I went back
to POP access. I didn't find the IMAP-like access via Deltasync a
compelling reason to continue using the add-on (but then I rarely access
my Hotmail accounts from more than one location, and when I do then it
via the webmail client).
The icon for the "Junk e-mail" folder created in Outlook already has a
hazard overlay in it (the slashed red circle). There's nothing special
about that symbol as it isn't added because of some state for that
folder. That is the normal icon for the junk folder. The junk folder's
icon looks like a folder atop of which is an envelope atop of which is
the international hazard symbol.
Do you actually have any e-mail in the Junk folder in your account (seen
using the webmail interface to it)? Did you configure the spam filter
in your Hotmail account (as seen using the webmail interface to check
your account's options) to keep suspect e-mails (delete later) or to
delete them permanently? If you configured the server-side spam filter
in your Hotmail account to immediately and permanently delete the
suspect (junk) e-mails then they won't be in your account for Outlook to
retrieve them from there.
