Lately a lot of my friends (who are not It people) send emails to our group of friends. Because they all use msn and hotmail, they sent it to my hotmail account. Because I have hotmail,gmail,jabber,… accounts I use Pidgin (formerly gaim) to do my chatting. This off course works perfectly. But I can’t see how many messages are in my email inbox (hmm, note feature to check if available). So today I quickly wanted to forward my hotmail mails to my own domain. Well really, you should try doing that … Really try it, I mean it!
In your webmail (hotmail live, piece of crap) you have options -> more options. There is an option forward to other email. If you read the comment, forward your email to other hotmail,msn or custom domains. So I inserted my own email address. Receiving the error that it wasn’t valid. So after reading the help, it stated that custom domains are not microsoft domains managed by microsoft (prolly something like you can do with google domain apps).
Hmm, no go. Then I started downloading some opensource tools (thunderbird extension,gotmail script,…) all couldn’t get the mail. Then I even tried getting it using gmail, still no go.
So in the end I have to say, what a piece of crap product is this. Compare this to google, google offers you pop3 imap to gmail, forwarding of emails even sms notification I believe (I only use this for my calendar and its free!!!! 😛 ) The webmail client of gmail is much better than the dog slow windows application. So tell me, if someone is asking you to make a new email address for him. Please consider before you lock yourself in like I did many many years ago. If only I had known 🙁
Any suggestions as how I can fix this ??? (And no I don’t want to delete my hotmail address, a lot of my friends have pictures from their events on it and prolly I can’t log in anymore) I’m even considering setting up a vmware with outlook express with a rule to forward to my imap box :s but thats really a big stupid work around imho. So … ??
Update
Thnx sch3lp (again) 🙂
But I found a feature in pidgin that displays how many messages are in my inbox. It works for Gmail and hotmail, you just got to love those developers 🙂
You can delete your hotmail account, which in your case also means deleting your msn login.
But what you need to login to msn is what M$ calls a “Windows Live Id”.
This does not necessarily have to be a hotmail account.
So what you do is delete your hotmail account, and create a new “windows live id” account, only using your gmail or whatever else you prefer.
I recommend making the transition easier by first creating your new msn id, and then notify your contact list you will be switching.
I know a lot of people who have done it like this, and the only people you’ll lose from your contact list are the people you never talk to (in my case, that sadly does mean the entire list :p but I used my pandora mail when I created my msn Id).
Good luck !
And yes, I too am a Google fan-boy.
Can’t wait to see Android revolutionizing the mobile market!