How To Forward ALL Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL And Live Mail Accounts With GetMail
What Is The Best Way Of Moving E-mail Between Accounts?
As promised in the last article that explained why GetMail for Hotmail doesn’t support alternative access methods to Hotmail accounts that have had WebDAV disabled this article will now explain how YOU can setup GetMail to forward mail from ALL Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and even Windows Live Mail accounts (not to mention literally hundreds of other webmail only services). The key to getting GetMail to work with these accounts is to take advantage of the many “Web To POP3” software products available. As mentioned already, my favourite of these is a program called FreePOPS, which as an added bonus also happens to be free. I’m not associated with the authors of FreePOPS in anyway but think it is a great piece of software and a utility which most of us will need at some point in our life (just imagine if Google restricted POP3 access to GMail, what would you do?). So here we go, how to use GetMail to forward your Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and even Windows Live Mail accounts:-
- The first thing to do is download the latest versions of both GetMail For Hotmail and FreePOPS.
- Now install FreePOPS, simply follow the prompts, it is a standard installer and very straight forward.
- Installing FreePOPS does NOT start it running, in order to launch FreePOPS select Start>Programs>FreePOPS>FreePOPS. It might look as though nothing has happened, if you look carefully you should be able to see the green FreePOPS (FP) icon in the tray icon area of your desktop (bottom right by default). Hovering your cursor over this icon will confirm that FreePOPS is running.
- Now install GetMail for Hotmail, again simply follow the prompts. You can either chose to run GetMail when it has installed or go to Start>Programs>GetMail>GetMail.
- One again it may look as though nothing is happening but the white GetMail icon should now be running in the tray area.
- Right click on the GetMail icon and select Settings from the menu
This is the main settings page, if you have an old WebDAV enabled Hotmail account that you wish to forward then this is where you would enter those settings, we are not interested in this page.- Click the small red (Extra Accounts) button at the top right, this will open the settings page where we can configure to forward from AOL, Yahoo etc
- Enter the full address of the account you wish to forward from(e.g. you@yahoo.com, you@aol.com etc), your account password, the address you wish to have mail forwarded to.
- From the Account Type drop down list select FreePOPS.
- For the SMTP server you will need to enter the details of a SMTP server that you have access to, I would recommend using your ISP’s. If you are note sure of the address of your SMTP server there is a SMTP Server list.
- Click Save (You may optionally wish to delete mail from the server when it has been forwarded).
- By pressing the Check For New Mail button the status will update and any mail should now be forwarded.
That’s all there is to it really, if you see any problems such as a Local port errors, a 3rd Party Software Error or that mail can not be forwarded please read on for some tips on solving common problems:-
Local port is not responding, check 3rd party software and their logs
There has been a problem with the process of retrieving the mail. This is normally down to you having the wrong version of FreePOPS. You should check the FreePOPS site and make sure that you have the latest version as well as installing any PATCHES from the FreePOPS homepage. You can see if there are any current problems with FreePOPS by checking their forums. Unfortunately by accessing mail via a browser interface regular software updates are a must. To confirm where the process is failing you should exit the standard version of FreePOPS (right click and exit) and run the debug version instead Start>FreePOPS>Debug>FreePOPS. A log file will then be generated at c:\program files\FreePOPS\ called Log_Raw.txt. By looking at this file you should be able to identify if FreePOPS has failed e.g.05/06/06 16:29:59 : Login failed: Sent login info to: none and got something we weren’t expecting(1):…
If you see something similar then it is just a case of waiting for FreePOPS to be updated.
I’ve checked the FreePOPS log and all I see is a timeout?
This timeout is occurring because GetMail for Hotmail has incorrect smtp server settings entered. The connection to FreePOPS is dropped first disguising what the actual problem is. Please double check your SMTP settings within GetMail.
… messages could not be forwarded on
The messages have been retrieved correctly but they could not be forwarded. This is a GetMail for Hotmail error and is notifying you that your SMTP settings are wrong. Double check your SMTP settings to make sure that everything is ok, it may just be the case that GetMail is not compatible with the authentication model that your SMTP server is using. If you are unable to get this working with a SMTP server you might want to try some local SMTP server software. I’ve had success with QK SMTP Server which is both cheap and fast.
For a video guide to getting GetMail for Hotmail working with FreePOPS, just make a donation and you’ll receive access to the donators area.
If you are seeing socket errors then I’d advise that you check out the GetMail for Hotmail FAQ.