[clue-tech] Good Linux solution for Hotmail

[Peter Kuykendall]

Finally it looks like there's a good solution in the pipeline for accessing Hotmail from Linux.  For once, Microsoft blinked, and backed away from proprietary, closed source protocols.  They are finally opening up POP3 and SMTP access to Hotmail.  Of course, not in the USA yet!

It appears that this was driven by cell phones which support POP3 and SMTP, and M$ figured out that they can't possibly push their proprietary junk into enough cell phones to avoid customer churn away from Hotmail.

http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!32413.entry
We are happy to announce that POP3 technology is now available to Hotmail users in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. If you don't see your country or region in this list, never fear, we'll be rolling POP3 out to more parts of the world later this year. 

If you are not lucky enough to be in a country yet with POP3 access, then you could simply alter your Hotmail account to a country that does.
Article here on altering your country to the United Kingdom, which then allows POP3 access.
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/01/22/hack-to-enable-hotmail-pop3-and-smtp-support-instantly-for-all-countries/

As mentioned on this list before, I have kept an XP VM running on my Linux machine just so that I could reliably access Hotmail and run Visio.  Well, I hardly ever need Visio from Linux nowadays, so this fix should mean that I no longer have to fire up the XP VM.  Free at last!
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