So you have a Hotmail account (who doesn’t) and you want to use it just like you use most if not all of the other accounts – through your desktop email client. It is understood that if you are one of the proponents of the Web based email clients that this post does not apply to you.

What you’d expect is that you’ll just create a new account in your email client (most clients support many accounts), set POP3/IMAP parameters, set aside a separate folder in the email Inbox and that’s it, yes?

Wrong. Hotmail is not accessible via simple POP3 supposedly due to the large number of spammers that would then more easily abuse the service. I wonder how come Google offered POP3 access to everyone for the GMail service if this was such a huge problem.

Microsoft decided to create a project called Outlook Connector. It’s an add-in for Outlook 2003/2007 (only these two clients are supported) and to justify the creation of the whole thing they threw in a couple of extra features like synchronization of contacts, tasks and notes.

While the additional features sound nice, I wonder why this functionality isn’t integrated in the Outlook in the first place (even if it's a paid service). Most people just want to access their email and nothing more and for this task, the Connector is a horrible tool.

Connector’s UI is ugly, inconsistent with the rest of the Outlook and looks like something welded on the regular Outlook’s UI. It’s a 4+MB download that replicates basic account management UI already present in the client. Finally, it only works with Outlook (duh!) as the name implies.

A simple POP3 access for any email client would be just fine (if Google can do it, Microsoft can do it too). Why this product exists is beyond me. I think the programming effort should have been spent on better spam fighting techniques on the server and not burdening end-users will pointless add-ons.