Thanks! The Hotmail account seems to have repaired itself for the
moment.
Hmm! The account is from before Hotmail was bought by Microsoft.
The web-interface (in Safari) has returned to its previous look.
Doing a Google search with:
grandfathered account
<
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2j2o34>
Doesn't look good for En'rage and Hotmail:
Axel,
It's confusing that you are able at all to access a FREE Hotmail
account via Entourage.
But lucky you!
Are you connecting via Entourage
or by connecting over the internet using some browser??
If "grandfathering" is the reason you can still connect via Ent, then
my accounts should have been "grandfathered" as well as they are all
very old and prior to MS purchase.
But I doubt that there is any "grandfathering" policy by Hotmail.
Years ago I had many (around 15-22) free Hotmail accounts that I could
access via Entourage (2001, 98) and I used an Ent Schedule to collect
their email all in one swoop.
This combination of Entourage and Hotmail was wonderful and workable.
The many accounts allowed me to control spam, segregate mail types and
sources, and run some spam honeypots as well.
Then, around 3 years ago??, Hotmail officially changed their POLICY
regarding free accounts and somehow made it so that any version of
Entourage (2001, 2004) could NOT ACCESS a free Hotmail account, but
could only access a PAID account.
So none of my Entourage Schedules worked any longer.
(At the time of the problems and errors from the change, it was VERY
HARD to get a straight answer from Hotmail as to why Entourage was not
working. But eventually it came out....and it is now documented in
Hotmail's support literature.....and Hotmail now generates an error
message when you try to use Ent Schedules that informs you that you
have to move to PAID Hotmail accounts.)
During the first 2 years, I could use an internet browser like IE, to
connect to each free Hotmail account over the web, but had to
individually connect to each Hotmail account.
I had to type in name and password for each invidivual account and
slowly navigate around in its web-based mail system. This worked, but
took 1-2 hours of time to access and deal with the email. Very
laborious and ultimately unmanageable.
I couldn't handle the large number of Hotmail accounts (15) and so
eventually terminated many of them and reduced to 4-6 accounts.
Then, about 1 year ago, I started having lots of problems accessing
and using (without crashing) these few remaining Hotmail accounts.
Now it is completely impossible to access these Hotmail accounts over
the IN--it looks like the connection gets made sometimes, but I only
end up with a halfway blank page or a page that crashes.
Perhaps the problem is that I was still using an OS 9.2 Mac and IE
5.1.7.
Now that I have a newer Mac with OS 10.4.4, I'll have to try again to
see if I can connect by using newer browers (IE, Safari, etc.). But
I'm not hopeful and the accounts should have all terminated by now for
going past the 30 day manditory connection requirement (although they
still might be recoverable).
The bottom-line is that, via Hotmail's policy, you should NOT be able
to connect to any free Hotmail account using Entourage, but you should
be able to connect to a paid Hotmail account.
(In my case, I wasn't willing to pay for 4-6 different accounts,
especially since I already get email accounts via my ISP Comcast.)
If you have a way to use Entourage with free Hotmail accounts, then
let us know how!
PS Macintosh
