I've been trying without success to access Hotmail using Outlook Express 5.02. I know that there have been intermittent problems between OE Mac and Hotmail, but I've just installed it today (May 6) and haven't been able to get it working at all! I access the net through a local proxy (port 8080, bypass not possible), the settings of which are shared with IE5 and have been properly configured. But when I choose to check my Hotmail account, all I get is a -1400 error (HTTP error. The request cannot be fulfilled). I've tried toying around with the settings to no avail. I've even tried applying the patch mentioned on MacFixit (which changes the server address used to access Hotmail). I'm seriously P.O. with Microsoft. They touted Hotmail integration to be a main feature of OE 5. Yet, there isn't even a decent FAQ or troubleshooting guide on the subject. There's no email address for technical support either. And don't even get me started on their message board, which are all-questions and no-answers. The government can break Microsoft up for all I care. It's about time they found out they can't get away with something like this!

[slboett]

It works fine on my Macs...

Scott

[George Orville]

Ethan,
Befor you blame other software>IE<, you should do what is required to clean up problems on your computor.
Thousands and thoudands of us are using IE 5.0 with no or very little problems.
You have problems with your OS &/or 3rd party sw... Clean them up and other SW will perform as they should

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George

ethan, I am in your exact same shoes. I've been trying to get OE 5 to successfully work with Hotmail for a month now w/o any success. I go to Mactopia for some technical support, but there is no easy way to contact it. This is a serious problem with OE and it is obviously getting overlooked (there have been 2 OE 5 revisions and the problem still exists).

To anyone thinks that we are the only ones with this problem, just go read the Microsoft Mac OE newsgroup, and there are about 3 new complaints each day about people not being able to access Hotmail w/ OE.

I really wish MacNN would say something about this on their site, and hopefully get M$' attention.

[slboett]

I don't think anyone "doubts" you are having trouble, but statistically, the numbers are small. I'm sure there are people in the Mac group at MS looking into this - they are listening and doing a good job, IMHO.

Scott

[iMacMike]

I had problems to begin with but fixed them by deleting the Hotmail entry in the Accounts window and re-entering it. I've also read that Hotmail recently re-initialized their accounts database and all accounts now require an 8 character password. There have been posts that changing your password through the Hotmail site has fixed the problem as well.

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I work, I play, iMac!

Well I'm having the same problem with my Mac, so maybe if enough people complain about this there will be a bug fix.

I was able to retrieve my hotmail using OE 5.02, the first time I set it up. Since then I have been unable to access it. I did get asked to change my password as it was under 8 characters, since then though that hasn't made a difference.

I'm trying to set up Hotmail again, I'll see how it goes.

I posted my experiences not with the INTERMITTENT problem (it works sometime...then sometimes it doesn;t) and received many e-mails from others experiences the same occasional problem (and not finding any answers). I just wanted to concurr with the post that it is more than just an isolated issue with the original poster - Best!

Here was my original post:
OE5 won't connect with Hotmail - Error 1403...message indicates:

Error: Could not retrieve mail from the account "Hotmail".

Explanation: HTTP error. Access to the resource is forbidden.

I can log in to my hotmail account just fine via IE5 - I have only 500k of messages in my account. What gives and what do I do to fix it? (I've opened Outlook with the option key held down and optimized the mail databases - no change in this occasional problem.

I was able to get my hotmail with OE5 for about a week. But for the past couple months I get an Error -17599 expected data from hotmail server is missing. No reply from MS yet. Not even a "we have received your letter..."

For what it's worth, I was having intermittent problems with hotmail and OE5. It seemed to be a conflict when OE was not the sole user of the modem connection, esp if IE5 was using the connection at the same time. By ensuring all other apps using the connection are closed before opening OE5, then opening OE, clicking on the hotmail folder, then clicking send and receive all, and finally closing OE before opening IE, it functions OK.
Hope this helps,

Simon

Amendment to the above, my hotmail account on OE has started to misbehave despite my efforts above. It has 'sent' several messages that have not been received or returned, and I am uncertain of it's integrity wrt delivering all my mail. I've decided to change my main email account to another provider.

Simon

When I first instaled Outlook It was working just fine until one day I got that server error mesage. But I can't send or receive E-mail.

I have a Power Mac 7300/200mhz with 160 megs of ram. I knew it was nothing wrong with my hotmail account because I had the same account on an i-Mac and it worked perfectly fine and always works perfectly fine. So I tried to trouble shoot the problem by rebuilding my desktop, zapping the P-RAM, turning off all the extentions except my Mac OS Base set and all of my internet settings, deleting the MS Outlook preferences files in my system folder and deleting all the identity files in the Outlook folder and recreating a new account but nothing worked.

I just got so frustrated that I reinstaled my whole system software and that fixed the problem. But a few days later the problem started again. And I did not install anything new or different. I need help too!

[TATungseth]

Tell me if anyone else is noticing this -- but when OE isn't able to get hotmail mail, it doesn't save an error message! At least in my case -- when I can't get my mac.com mail or my ISP mail, OE is more than happy to chime in with an error message. But with hotmail -- it does nothing. It just doesn't send or receive the e-mail, but then logs no problem.

An interesting perspective that the programmers apparently took. OE can't POSSIBLY error when working with another Microsoft product!

At least in my case, my inability to send Hotmail e-mail for 4 days (while receiving with no problem) has resulted in not a single error message. Making troubleshooting that much more difficult.

I am an "ex" windows user, becoming familiar, and falling in love with my Powerbook. I am also new to newsgroups, but have found myself here out of sheer desperation...so sorry if I make any mistakes (this is my first post).

I am having trouble sending webpages in my emails. I have searched and searched for a solution to the problem, only to find others with the same problem. Yesterday during another futile attempt, I was able to insert the website into the email, the text was shown, just as it appeared on the website, however, the pictures on the website were not there. Not being exactly what I was wanting, I didn't attempt to "send" the mail, so I do not know it it would have worked or not. I wish there was more support for this program too.

I am using a Powerbook G3 and OE 5.02. My Hotmail account comes back with the error message "Expected data from hotmail server missing." Any Ideas?

I am using @home Cable

Hmm...
do you mean your trouble is the webpage shown on your email only have text and no pictures?

If you want to send webpages, you can just drag and drop the page into the email window. But as you know, if your webpages have pictures, you need to attach the pictures into the email as well, otherwise. It won't work.

Originally posted by Kristi:

I am having trouble sending webpages in my emails. I have searched and searched for a solution to the problem, only to find others with the same problem. Yesterday during another futile attempt, I was able to insert the website into the email, the text was shown, just as it appeared on the website, however, the pictures on the website were not there. Not being exactly what I was wanting, I didn't attempt to "send" the mail, so I do not know it it would have worked or not. I wish there was more support for this program too.
[/B]

I have intermitant problems trying to use outlook with a hotmail account. Namely, it will work some of the time, but half the time it seems to time out when requesting the messages, and throw an error. I've acually configured the program not to check my hotmail e-mail box, just so I don't have to go in and clear all the errors out after its been running for a while.

Fortunatly for me, however, I don't acually use my hotmail account, except for MSN Messanger. Ironically though I've never given my hotmail address out, and I get loads & loads of junk daily in the account. Immedeatly when I get a new message in the account I add the addresses to my block list. I've about 1000 addresses in it, and the junk keeps pooring in...

What baffles me is though I've never given the address out, and nobody sending to it knows my age, I still get tons of pornographic offers. They all simply read "delete if under 18", yet there's no way to acually stop them. If I were a parent I would be irate...

Oh well, guess I drifted a bit, but at any rate my main point is, the compatibility isn't great. I think the main reason I get the errors is due to my connection speed (I think there is too much communication involved in checking the messages, and not enough time for it to complete if I'm doing a high bandwidth activity). Though it works I still think there is some issues Microsoft needs to address with it...

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• -Bobby
  <http://www.torgo.org/>