Alternative Hotmail programme When Windows Live Mail Ends In June 2016

Try free eM Client. It can be installed as "non-default" email client for testing.

Email Client for Outlook.com | eM Client

Note: Personally I don't use outlook.com or hotmail accounts.

I do use it with gmail and one other webmail provider.

You can always try:

Mozilla Thunderbird Email Client

It's quite comprehensive, and if you already use any Mozilla software (cough*Firefox*cough) it's quite easy to learn. Supports POP3 and IMAP protocols, can use hardware acceleration for faster rending, You can easily switch accounts for composing emails, and multiple adress books, supports Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo and many others (as long as they support above protocols).

I know, I sound like a fanboy, but I use it, and I love it.

You got two options anyway, the best one is the one that suits you

Chris Nicola said:

Thanks for the suggestion. Thunderbird sounds like a good option. The problem with Hotmail accounts from June is that they will use a different protocol. Hopefully Other e mail programmes will be able to update their software to be compatible but I don't know if they will be willing to do this. Another problem is that I have a very large e mail store going back some years that I need to keep. I would like to import my e mail store into the new e mail client but I don't know if this is possible. If not then I will always need to keep Windows Live mail installed to be able to access the old e mails.

Kind regards

Chris

Microsoft is only removing Live/Outlook Syncronization protocol, a special protocol only used by WLM2012, POP3 and IMAP are still up, so all third party clients will work with Outlook.com.
You can use whatever client you want, if it supports POP3 or IMAP, Outlook wil work too.

I tried eM Client and it works Ok. IMO, not as good as WLM, but Ok.

It constantly reports errors when syncing with my hotmail account. The errors don't prevent it from working but they are annoying nonetheless.

strollin said:

I tried eM Client and it works Ok. IMO, not as good as WLM, but Ok.

It constantly reports errors when syncing with my hotmail account. The errors don't prevent it from working but they are annoying nonetheless.

Suggest:

Check Tools> Settings> General

Also suggest using IMAP with Hotmail.

The only problem I've ever noticed is sometimes read messages are marked unread. It's a known bug that should be fixed in a forthcoming release.

Also see FAQ's

FAQ | Troubleshooting | Solving Problems | eM Client

POP3 accounts do not keep your items synchronized with the server and are only used to download new data

I've played with those sync settings quite a bit, doesn't help.

I haven't tried IMAP yet, eM Client makes some very large claims about being the best and the claim is that their client works with Hotmail (outlook.com). Shouldn't need to setup IMAP.

As I said before, it works and everything seems to sync Ok, only problem is that it keeps popping up an annoying box to report errors that don't seem to make a difference.