Local Email Client Nirvana for Hotmail/Live Users on a Mac… Am I Dreaming?

Have you recently made the switch, at least tentatively, to making a Mac your playground of choice for most of your computing requirements, if not all?

Do you have one or more Hotmail or Windows Live email accounts you simply can’t live without?

If you’ve grown accustomed, living in the Windows universe, to using Microsoft Outlook, or some other local email client application, like Mozilla Thunderbird, for the sending and receiving of your Hotmail and/or Live account emails, you’re in for a disappointing surprise when you try recreating this setup on a Mac: Even if you’ve purchased the latest version of Microsoft’s Outlook for Mac, bundled as part of Microsoft Office 2011, you’ll be sorely let down to find that the only synchronization protocol supported for Hotmail and Live account services, within Outlook 2011, is POP, and not IMAP – as is the norm within Outlook on Windows.

What this means is that all of your folder synchronization options, such as custom folders beneath your Hotmail or Live account Inbox, your Sent folder, Drafts folder, and even your Trash folder, are not on offer for display, let alone management, via the POP sync protocol Outlook 2011 for Mac provides you with… only your Inbox is there for you to check, nothing more. If you wanted to check on something as basic as previous emails you sent from your account, you can’t! Not unless you log-in via a web browser directly – defeating the whole point (and convenience) of having multiple Hotmail and/or Live email accounts at your disposal, together in one convenient place…

To add insult to injury, Hotmail and Live account services are actually owned and operated by Microsoft themselves, yet Microsoft Outlook 2011 does support IMAP synchronization (of Inbox, Sent, Draft, Trash, etc.) for Yahoo and GMail accounts, who are third party competitors!! What on Earth are they thinking up there in Redmond Washington?

One has to wonder… Do they actually want to see their customers leaving in droves and migrating their email accounts over to Google GMail and Yahoo?

Fortunately, there’s a solution. mBox Mail for Mac, from fluentfactory.com, is a small background application that facilitates all Hotmail and Windows Live folder sync operations silently behind the scenes. It’s available for download on a 30 day trial period, costing $19.99 if you should choose to keep it.

With a few slight setting changes to your email client application, for each of your Hotmail/Live account settings respectively, it’ll translate everything you’ve been missing and display your folders, and their contents, just like with IMAP. UNLESS you try using… wait for it… Microsoft Outlook 2011! Yes, even here, Outlook somehow manages to muddle the translation to the extent where only your Sent folder will come through, and even then it is more than a little glitchy to say the least. Mozilla Thunderbird for Mac, or Apple’s native Mail application, however, work like a charm with mBox, and considering how both of those are free, I decided to go with Apple’s out-of-the-box, Mail. I wasn’t disappointed!

So long as you’re running in OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or 10.7 (Lion), mBox Mail for Mac is the ultimate (if not only) solution available for users of Hotmail and Windows Live email accounts, who are looking to consolidate multiple email accounts within a single email application interface. Setup is a breeze, with detailed, step-by-step installation instructions (with screenshots), for multiple email client applications, so while it may sting to pay 20 bucks for something normally free, nothing beats the satisfaction of having things just work like they’re supposed to at the end of the day.

After having personally spent many hours scouring the internet for solutions to this particular (and particularly wide-spread) issue, if it wasn’t for the solution made available via mBox, I’d probably still be spending most of my time running Windows. As of the time of this writing, there’s simply no other solution available.