With Hotmail unfortunately, you cannot use IMAP protocol to connect to the mail server. You have to use POP3 or HTTP, the later being a Microsoft only setup to use your Hotmail with Outlook or the phased out Outlook Express.

In Microsoft’s effort to keep up. It seems they are going to phase out this protocol and force people using Hotmail on Outlook to another platform.

This platform is the Microsoft Outlook Connector. If you can avoid it, I recommend that is what you do. We tested it on Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 in both English and Japanese.

It is a lame piece of software that slows down your machine. Outlook is already a memory hog, although I have got to say I am pretty used to it. Therefore, this slows things down even more.

Hope that information is helpful to you! Let us know if you have any comments.