E-Mail Stationery in Hotmail with Outlook Express

You can configure Hotmail so that Outlook Express can be used to send and receive messages on your Hotmail account. When you do this you are still also able to access your Hotmail account online (via your web browser.)

Accessing a Hotmail account through Outlook Express has a number of advantages:

  • You can keep a large amount of e-mail without overflowing the storage available to you at Hotmail. You can move (drag and drop) messages from your Hotmail folders to local folders for long term storage.

  • You can read your messages "offline". I.e. you can read them while your computer is not connected to the Internet.

  • E-Mail stationery will work. Most e-mail stationery uses "scripting", which is not supported by Hotmail online (when you use Hotmail in your web browser.) When you view the same messages in Outlook Express instead, you can see them as intended.

If you already access your Hotmail account this way, and you are not seeing received stationery correctly in Outlook Express, please click on one of the following links for more information about your version of Outlook Express:

Outlook Express 5 and 5.5

Outlook Express 6

To set up your Hotmail account for use in Outlook Express:

Run Outlook Express

Click Tools -> Accounts...

Click on the Mail tab. 

Click Add -> Mail...

Enter the name you'd like to have displayed in your e-mails, then click Next.

Enter your existing Hotmail e-mail address, i.e. xxx@hotmail.com where xxx is your address, then click Next.

On the next screen make sure that beside "My HTTP mail service provider is" it shows Hotmail. Click Next.

Beside "Account name" enter your Hotmail account name, i.e. the "xxx" part of your xxx@hotmail.com account. Enter your password.  Click Next.

Click Finish.

That's it! After you finish the above setup your Outlook Express will contain a new folder called "Hotmail" with a number of folders inside it. They can be accessed just like any other folders in Outlook Express.