I don’t really use my Hotmail address for anything other than occasional testing, but I’ve always wanted to forward it to my GMail account. Searching the Internet on occasion didn’t yield any acceptable results. It seemed that some people were simply able to set this up via the “Forward mail to another e-mail account” option, while others couldn’t. It never worked for me. Another search yesterday finally led me to the solution, buried deep in some comments to a blog post.
Here is how to set it up:
After you logged in to Hotmail go to “Options”. This is where the option to “Forward mail to another e-mail account” is located. Generally, if you try to use this option to forward your mail to another (non Hotmail) account, you will see a poorly worded error telling you: NO :(
So instead, click on “Mobile alerts for new messages” in “Options”.
Here you will find a link to setup or make changes to “Windows Live Mobile”. Follow this link and setup a mobile device for alerts.
You are only setting this up to enable forwarding, not to actually receive any alerts.
Once you have confirmed your mobile device go back to Hotmail. You may have to manually go back as Microsoft doesn’t make it intuitive. After you’re logged back into your Hotmail account go to “Mobile alerts for new messages” settings and select “None. Never send me mobile alerts” from the options and save these settings.
Note: You might have to click on a link here to finish the Windows Live Mobile setup, before you are able to set the alerts to “None”.
After following these steps you will now be able to forward your messages to the email address of your choice. Just click on “Forward mail to another e-mail account” in “Options”, enter any email address and save.
So, with a little trickery you’ve now enabled forwarding of Hotmail to your preferred email address. It’s telling that inferior services like Hotmail try to lock you in while superior services like GMail aren’t afraid to give users the freedom they desire. On another note, you may have to login to your Hotmail account occasionally to keep it from being disabled for inactivity.
Update 2009/02/17:
Supposedly pop3 support for hotmail has arrived in the US:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/next-up-hotmail-pop3-support-arrives-in-the-us-brazil.ars
September 10, 2008, 11:15am
