Goodbye, Hotmail
Over the years, I have accumulated a large number of free Hotmail accounts. Several of these accounts were created over seven years ago, long before Microsoft made their first major overhaul to the Hotmail service. The overhaul happened quietly around five years ago (if I remember correctly), and directly affected the way in which all future Hotmail accounts operated.
One of the differences between the (very) old accounts and those established after Microsoft changed everything, is the way in which Thunderbird (and various other open-source email applications) is able to process emails from either type of account. For some reason, all of my old Hotmail accounts are processed perfectly well from within Thunderbird; however, those accounts created within the last several years do not play nice at all.
Unlike the older accounts, which are completely synchronized and integrated into Thunderbird, the newer accounts continually throw errors whenever they are checked for new email. These errors are usually associated with good ‘ol Hotmail not accepting any preset passwords, which must be re-entered manually every time email is checked. Needless to say, this behavior is very inconvenient. Meanwhile, the older accounts function flawlessly.
To get the Hotmail accounts to work at all with Thunderbird, two extensions are required, Webmail and its Hotmail-specific add-on. These two extensions enable users to integrate and process their Hotmail accounts along with all of their other email accounts. At first, the Webmail extensions worked perfectly with all Hotmail accounts; then, after a year or so, the newer Hotmail accounts stopped working. After upgrading the Webmail extensions, the newer Hotmail accounts would work, but then another year or so later, the same thing would happen all over again.
Occasionally, I have been able to get the newer Hotmail accounts to work by rolling back the Webmail extensions to previous versions, but this does not always work. Frankly, I suspect that the good ‘ol boys down at the Hotmail factory purposely tweak the system settings such that Hotmail is incompatible with free, open-source email applications like Thunderbird. I don’t know, but one thing is certain, the changes are happening on the Hotmail side of the fence, and they are changing their settings either deliberately or without concern for non-Outlook users.
So, as I find this cycle having come full-circle again, I am once again unable to check emails on newer Hotmail accounts. The bad news is that I am plumb out of previous Webmail extensions to try, and there aren’t any new versions to check out. So, as of today I am officially dumping all of my newer Hotmail accounts. I no longer have the patience or free time to spend fiddling things, trying to second-guess periodic changes on the Hotmail server. I will certainly keep the older accounts for as long as they continue to work, but the newer accounts are just not worth the effort. So, goodbye, Hotmail, I will never open another account with you again.
