Atlasland said:
How, exactly? What settings do you need? In particular, what do you use as the SMTP server?
I tried it with a Hotmail account, but couldn't get it to work. I should point though out that I am a bit of a noob at this.
It is not the most n00b friendly thing in the world, and there have been issues recently because Yahoo and Hotmail both unveiled substantially new interfaces in the past month or two. But let me give you a try here....
The idea is that FreePOPs acts as an arbitrage for INCOMING mail only. It doesn't do anything for outgoing mail. It logs into the website, reads the web-based e-mail, decodes the message out of it, and hands the message back to your mail program.
So in terms of settings, you run FreePOPs, and then *it* becomes your incoming server. When you use MacFreePOPs, when it is first run, it gives you an IP address and port to put in as your POP server. The IP address is usually 127.0.0.1. If you do not recognize that, it's the "loopback" address -- it refers to your own computer (i.e. when I ping 127.0.0.1 from my computer, it loops back to my computer. When you do it from yours, it loops back to yours).
You give your username on that POP server as your full e-mail address from the service in question (e.g.
xxx@yahoo.com) and your password as your actual password.
When you try to get mail from your mail program, then your mail program hits the loopback address and contacts the FreePOPs daemon running on your computer. It in turn contacts the website, logs in, and gets your mail. It's not *perfect* -- it sometimes has connection failures and you have to re-load it.
But I do have it working for both Hotmail (a pretty old account out of Hotmail Japan, but I have the latest interface when I log in on the web) and Yahoo (also a pretty old account). I'm using the latest "ahead of trunk" beta .lua files from freepops.org for both Yahoo and Hotmail. This isn't persistently an issue, but when the services are in them midst of changing their architecture, the lua files have to change too.
Anyway, that's INCOMING mail. FreePOPs does NOT do outgoing mail. The typical scenario is that you receive internet service from a home ISP (cable or DSL, etc) or a school. In most situations, these sites give you an smtp address (smtp.east.cox.net for Cox home cable internet, for instance, in this part of the US). Typically, this SMTP server will accept your outgoing mail, when you are inside the network, from ANY e-mail address. For instance, I can send @yahoo.com, @gmail.com, @ufl.edu, etc, etc, all from my Cox SMTP server when I am at home. In fact, I don't know about where you live, but this is increasingly becoming not just possible but NECESSARY.
Where I live, the ONLY SMTP I am able to access from home is the one for Cox. I know BellSouth DSL is this way too, and more and more other DSLs. And actually, also, at school, I can only send e-mails out via the schools' SMTP servers. Supposedly this is an anti-spam effort, but that's neither here nor there.
So anyway, in the typical scenario, you already have an SMTP and you don't need one from Yahoo or Hotmail. Does that make sense? You should contact your ISP to find out what their SMTP is.
It's also worth mentioning that HTTPMail also does not do outgoing mail, AFAIK. So that's a wash. I will say that HTTPMail is an easier solution if you just want Hotmail, though.
Longwinded...does it help?
