Hotmail users with Intel Macs face problems using Mail.app to read their emails.

Cris Pierry points out that HTTPMail, a Mail plugin that enables the downloading of emails from Hotmail’s web interface has not yet been compiled as a universal binary.

As a result it won’t run as a plugin in Mail.app on Intel Macs. He provides instructions on forcing Mail to run under Rosetta, which produces quite a performance hit but allows you to use HTTPMail.

As far as I know, other options for “translating” emails from web-based email services, Mail Forward and MacFreePOPs, are not yet universal binaries either.

For Cris, running Mail under Rosetta is unbearable. He is going to use the web interface to get his email while he moves over to Gmail.

UPDATE: As Gavin suggests in the comments on another post, there is an easy work-around for Hotmail users:

1. Set up a Fastmail account (it’s free and it’s excellent. I have a (paid) account there, so I know how good it is). Of course, any good email service that offers polling of web-based mail will do the trick.
2. Set the Fastmail account to poll your Hotmail account and to download the messages into your IMAP account at Fastmail.
3. Collect your Fastmail messages in Mail.app.

hotmail, web-based email, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, universal, Gmail, fastmail

Hotmail runs over 10,000 servers world-wide processing billions of email transactions everyday. All of this is mananged by less than 100 system administrators.

Microsoft MSN‘s product unit manager Phil Smoot speaks to ACM Queue about how it all works.

It’s an interesting glimpse behind the scenes of a web-based email service.