In M10 we re-introduced the POP aggregation feature in Windows Live Hotmail.  This feature is not about accessing your Hotmail messages using POP3 protocol but using your other POP3 enabled email accounts from within the Hotmail’s rich and famous web interface.  Once configured, your external mails can be “aggregated” or pulled into your Hotmail mailbox.  You can add up to four external POP3 mail accounts and let Hotmail aggregate the messages from those accounts and show them in your Hotmail inbox with click of just one button.  You can either leave them in your Inbox and be distinguished by different colored icons, or better yet, create custom filters to automatically route those messages into separate folders (how can anyone use an email system without folders?). You can go to Automatically sort e-mail messages into folders to create a custom filter for your POP messages.

While developing this feature, I continuously kept the user’s perspective in mind.  Adding not just a “feature” but a “useful feature” was the top priority.  At the cost of high bandwidth usage and risk of talking to unknown, unreliable POP3 servers, we kept all the security concerns in mind and tried to deliver a significantly useful option for those who use more than one email account.  I personally loved this feature when I was simply a user of Hotmail and was not part of the development team.  It lets me see my mails from different accounts into one web based mail.  The option of leaving a copy of original messages on the POP3 servers gives me flexibility to use in tandem with POP3 clients.  Now you should have no need to install and configure POP3 clients for your other email accounts, especially useful on public computers.  And since Hotmail lets you send mails from these accounts as well, you would never need to use any other email client.

At this point, it’s available only to paid users (plus some partner users, university program users).  We’d love to offer it to free users in the future, so we’re looking into that and may do so at some time in the future. To try POP aggregation, go to Options->Send receive mail from other email accounts and click on “Add a POP3 account”.  Once configured, go to your Inbox and you will see a POP button. Clicking the POP in the inbox will check for new Hotmail messages as well as messages from your POP accounts.

The feature is just at its beginning, we have planned to add many more bells and whistles in the coming Hotmail releases.  Stay tuned and keep loving Windows Live Hotmail.

- Ashu Tewari, Software Development Engineer