Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for Hotmail: Better than IMAP

So, Google’s been offering IMAP access to Gmail for quite some time now.  What about Windows Live Hotmail users…all eight of them?  Are they just left hangin’ with *scoff* POP3?  (Okay, I kid…there are literally hundreds* of Hotmail users still in existence.)

Well, if you’re a Hotmail user that also has access to Microsoft Outlook, either at home or at work, then you’re in luck.  For a little while now, Microsoft has been offering Microsoft Office Outlook Connector: an Outlook plugin that lets you access and synchronize your Hotmail account(s) from within Outlook.

Much like with IMAP, E-mails that you send/receive/file in Outlook are mirrored in your Hotmail account online upon hitting that magical Send/Receive button. 

For example, e-mails that you send from your account in Outlook are, as you might expect, stored in the “sent items” folder right there in Outlook but also get uploaded to the “sent items” folder of Hotmail.  (Same for “deleted items,” “drafts,” etc.)  In addition, the tool also allows you to synchronize your Hotmail contacts and calendar.

In my opinion, this option acts even better than traditional IMAP access because, for the most part, IMAP remains a relatively flaky technology.  As an Outlook/Gmail user, I experience the following annoyances with my Gmail IMAP connection in Outlook 2007:  frequent disconnects, quirky synchronizations, LENGTHY synchronization times and my own personal favorite… the inability to take advantage of Outlook’s feature-rich flagging options on messages.

That last one is actually a problem with how Outlook treats IMAP connections, not a problem with IMAP in general…but allow me to explain.  You see, natively, you can right-click on a message in Outlook and “flag” it for follow-up by selecting one of many different follow-up options: Today, Tomorrow, This Week, Next Week, No Date and Custom.  That flagged message then appears as a “task” in your task list or in your To-Do Bar (new to OL2007.)  With IMAP messages, you only get one follow-up option: “Flag.”  Then, if you do decide to go ahead and generically flag that bad boy, it shows up multiple times in your To-Do Bar.  (That one’s actually due to the Gmail IMAP folder structure in Outlook.) 

Neither of these quirks exist with messages retrieved by the Outlook Connector.  Sure, that’s not a big deal but I personally find it highly annoying.

Anyways, I’ll most likely not be switching back to Windows Live Hotmail anytime soon (mainly due to that horrificly awful banner ad in place at mail.live.com) but I wanted to point out the availability and uniqueness of this particular tool to those of you using the Hotmail/Outlook (2003 or 2007) combo.  If you’re interested, you can find it for download here on Microsoft’s downloads site or packaged as an available option in the new Windows Live Wave 3 installer.

*Hundreds, few million…same diff.

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