Mail.app users with Hotmail or Yahoo Mail accounts have long had to use third-party plugins to get hold of their emails.

MacFreePOPs is one such utility that is already Lion-compatible and supports an astonishing range of web-based mail servers, offering POP-like access to your accounts.

Another plugin, mBox Mail , is just for Hotmail users and claims to offer a more “IMAP-like” experience.

It allows mail.app (or any other IMAP-enabled mail client like Thunderbird or Entourage/Outlook) to access Hotmail messages and folders, syncs trash between your mail client and the server and also syncs up drafts, sent mail and message flags.

A patch to make the app Lion-friendly has just been released.

Unlike MacFreePOPs which is donation-ware, an mBox Mail licence costs USD 19.99, although a 30 day free trial is available to try it out first.

I ought to confess that (contrary to my usual commitment) I haven’t tested this out first to see how well it works.

Well, who would have thought? News of Hotmail’s death for mail.app users is exaggerated.

Microsoft has relented and deferred the transition from WebDAV to its own DeltaSync standard. This means that Mail.app users with HTTPMail and MacFreePOPs plugins won’t be cut off on 30 June after all.

After listening to customer feedback from the original accouncement, Microsoft told its users “it became clear that you needed additional time to evaluate alternative solutions”.

Still, this only postpones the executioner’s axe. Don’t fritter away all the extra time Microsoft has given you in making a decision.

With apologies for any distress.

[Via The Fastmail.fm Weblog ] Apple Mail, fastmail, GMAIL, hotmail, httpmail, macfreepops, mail.app, microsoft, webmail, webdav

UPDATE: Not quite as bad as it sounds — See later post.

In April Microsoft announced that it would be terminating WebDAV access to its Hotmail accounts at the end of June this year and replacing it with a proprietary service of Microsoft’s own creation (DeltaSync).

This is bad news for Mail.app users with Hotmail accounts, who have been using utilities like HTTPMail and MacFreePOPs to access their email. After 30 June, they won’t work. (There are reports that 10.5.3 has broken HTTPMail for some users, merely hastening the inevitable).

For those unwilling to let go their Hotmail email address, another solution beckons. While the plugins might not work any more, a web-based service is offering the same function.

IzyMail , so it claims, “enables you to access webmail from major providers such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Windows Live, Fastmail or Gmail with any eMail application”. It even has a special page on setting up Hotmail on the iPhone.

It provides users with incoming and outcoming servers that can be plugged into Mail.app’s Accounts preferences. IzyMail does the heavy-lifting behind the scenes, and delivers fresh Hotmail into your Inbox via POP.

It offers free accounts (with some limitations) and a paid option (c. USD 18/year):

Or perhaps it’s time to take another look at Gmail. microsoft, hotmail, httpmail, macfreepops, wevdav, webmail, izymail, mail.app, apple mail, gmail, fastmail, yahoo, aol, desperate measures

MacFreePOPs is a stand-alone app which allows you to use Mail.app with web-based mail services like Yahoo, hotmail, Gmail, AOL and SquirrelMail.

An updated version (1.6) has been released. It includes a more recent version of FreePOPs (0.0.97), an English localisation, a better log window, detailed plug-in information and an improved on-line update system.

MailForward is another utility that does the same job. It is easier to use, but it costs money.

MacFreePOPs is donation-ware and is available from the project’s web site .macfreepops, yahoo!, gmail, AOL, hotmail, squirrelmail, plugin, mail.app, apple mail

No doubt the Internet will be soggy with self-indulgent nostalgia today. Here’s my contribution.

Hawk Wings spluttered into life at the end of July this year as a way to learn about blogging and as a tribute to a little app that I quite like.

It was relaxing and a pleasant distraction from the real world, so I continued. Over the last five months, a few of my posts proved popular (by Hawk Wings’ standards) with readers:

Top Five Most Popular Posts

1. MacFreePOPs: Getting emails from hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, SquirrelMail, AOL, etc. MacFreePOPs just seems to run and run. I don’t know where the hits come from, but it is by far the most popular thing I ever blogged.
2. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have. Recent and popular, some people found this a useful entry point into the world of plug-ins and/or fun to disagree with.
3. Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail. With help from Andreas Amann, this post collected some helpful ways to make the break from Thunderbird.
4. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail. Never was a niche market focussed on time-efficiency willing to spend so much time reading about how to do it :-)
5. Apple Mail: The Early Years. My first blogging “triumph”. The pre-history of Mail.app as NeXTMail in NeXTSTEP.

But sometimes it happens — on blogs and in life — that the best things are not the most popular ones.

Here are five posts that added something which wasn’t there before:

Top Five Best Posts

1. Apple Mail: The Early Years. With help from Don Yacktman and John Kheit, I was able to gather together some oral history before it disappears.
2. Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod. Jeffrey Glover was kind enough to share a step-by-step walk-through on storing your Mail folder on a iPod.
3. What’s in your Mail folder?. A Cook’s Tour of your Mail folder. Poking around in order to write this was fun.
4. Services and Apple Mail. A small contribution to a much neglected aspect of Mac OS X and of working smarter in Apple Mail.
5. Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part I and Part II. Blogging is often about being a magpie, picking shiny things out of the never-ending piles of other people’s posts.

   Here I think I really wrestled something to the ground, got some understanding of GTD, and produced two posts that added a bit to the ways in which Mail.app can be used.

Of course, there were less successful moments too.

I discovered several new Mail features that have been around since Jaguar and completely misunderstood what the new iChat SSL certificates were about. Also my arguments in favour of top-posting proved more persuasive to me than anyone else.

Since its birth in July, Hawk Wings has served 901,547 pages and moved up 3,099,986 places in Technorati’s rankings. Nothing to be too proud of, as there are still 22,669 blogs people would rather read than this one.

See you in 2006 (unless 10.4.4 sees us first).

On the new Apple Discussion Forums I see some users are reporting that the http-mail plugin is busted. This plugin is used to access web-based email services, specifically Hotmail‘s.

Bug reports have been lodged on the httpmail Sourceforge page.

While you are waiting, you could try some other options like MacFreePOPs or MailForward.

As far as I know they are working fine post-10.4.3