This is a follow-up to this article, where I said there are many ways of "syncing" a POP account, and this is another way of going about it using a separate Hotmail account.

Requirements:

• An email client with auto-blind-carbon-copy, a.k.a. auto-bcc capability (such as Mozilla Thunderbird, nPOPuk, Sylpheed, etc.)
• A Hotmail account (if already using a Hotmail account, sign up for another one)

Step 1. Set up your Hotmail to retrieve messages from your POP account

Login to Hotmail, go to the Inbox.

Look at the far right side, click Options then More Options:

Under Show options for, click Hotmail:

Click Sending/receiving email from other accounts:

From that point, add in the information for your existing POP email account:

You will need to know your proper incoming mail server name and whether the server requires a standard (110) or SSL (995) port connection.

When finished you will have the option of placing incoming mail into the Hotmail inbox or a separate folder name. It is suggested to use a separate folder and use the email address itself as the folder name.

Important notes:

• Once you set your account up, you will be sent a confirmation mail to the POP account with a link that you must click to validate it.
• Hotmail by default does not delete any mail retrieved via POP and always leaves a copy.

Step 2. Create a rule to filter POP mail from you to ‘sentmail’ folder

Go to the main inbox view for Hotmail.

Hover over "Folders" on the left, click the little cog icon and click "Manage Rules":

On the next screen, click the "New" button:

Under Step 1, select Sender’s address, is, [your POP email account]. Under Step 2, click on Inbox and from the drop-down menu, select Move to a new folder and type in sentmail in the field next to it.

When finished, click the Save button at bottom.

Step 3. In your email client, always bcc your Hotmail address on each sent mail

Using Mozilla Thunderbird as an example, under ‘Copies & Folders’ for any mail account you can choose the option to auto-bcc an address on any email sent:

Any mail sent from the mail client at that point will bcc your Hotmail address.

That’s it. You’re done.

How this all works

You can continue to use your email as you always have, but now this is what happens – all automatically:

1. Hotmail will download a copy of each new email sent to you and store it in the folder you chose within that mail system.
2. Any mail sent will be auto-bcc’d to the Hotmail account, where it will be filtered into the ‘sentmail’ folder, making it easy to see where incoming and outgoing mail is per messages downloaded from the POP account.

All your mail from that point forward will be "synced" to Hotmail. I put that in quotes because it’s not true sync, but close enough.

Final notes

There are only two bad parts about doing this. Yeah, you knew there had to be some, but it’s not so bad.

1. You will have to login to your Hotmail account at least once every 270 days to keep it active. Obviously, you’re not going to remember to do something 270 days from now, so it would be best to set up a calendar reminder either via your cell phone or other calendar that will email you a reminder to login to that Hotmail account at least once a month.
2. Hotmail may flag certain emails retrieved via POP as spam by mistake (initially). This doesn’t mean you won’t get the mail in your client the way you always have, but it does mean Hotmail will sent it to the Junk folder on its end. You may have to "Not Junk" a few mails when you first set up your POP account in Hotmail.

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