Poor Hotmail experience

My Outlook is really slow with Hotmail accounts but fine on anything POP3. It doesn’t seem to keep a record of what’s been synched already i.e.: if I do a send/recieve on a Hotmail Inbox it synchs the whole box – taking 20 mins or so – but next time I load Outlook up they’re all not synched again. When I move to a Hotmail Inbox it can be 30-60 seconds saying “synchronizing message headers” or times out with an error.

Is there a simple fix?

Actually there is, as it sounds like you are using Outlook’s default HTTP connection to connect to your Live Hotmail account. A long technical story short; the way of connecting to Live Hotmail accounts has been replaced by using a special add-in which is optimized for the new features and larger mailbox sizes of Live Hotmail and has a far better caching mechanism than the default HTTP connection.

This special add-in is called the Outlook Hotmail Connector and can be installed via the Windows Live Essentials suite or downloaded individually via the links below;

Download: Outlook Hotmail Connector 32-bit
Download: Outlook Hotmail Connector 64-bit
Note: You will only need to install the 64-bit version when you are using the 64-bit version of Outlook 2010.

Note: If you prefer to download your Hotmail messages via POP3 instead of using the Outlook Hotmail Connector, you can find the settings needed in this guide.