14 DAY TRIAL // Keep your Hotmail accounts close, and your rival email accounts even closer must be the new mantra over at Microsoft. The Redmond company has announced that a new feature introduced to its email service under the Windows Live brand allows users to receive all their email in a single place no mater the service provider. As of June 30, 2009, some Windows Live users will see that they are able to add all their email accounts into Hotmail. The new feature comes on the heels of the introduction of support for the POP protocol in Windows Live Hotmail, which debuted at the start of 2009.
“Microsoft announced today that Hotmail email account aggregation is rolling out in the US, Canada and Brazil. This is a feature that allows consumers to receive email from other POP-enabled email accounts (including Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL) directly into their Windows Live Hotmail inbox. With this new feature, Windows Live Hotmail offers a one-stop place for managing email, making it easier for more than 400 million Windows Live customers worldwide to manage their multiple accounts from a single location,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Softpedia.
On the left-hand side of the Hotmail inbox users will notice a new option that will allow them to add an email account. They will need to know the email address as well as the password for the account they want to centralize into Hotmail. The final step will be to indicate the location in which the messages grabbed from the new account will be stored and click Save. The only prerequisite for this is that POP be turned on in the POP-enabled email service users attempt to integrate into Hotmail.
“This feature was launched earlier this year in the UK, France, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Germany, and was greeted with some very positive feedback. Today, customers in the US, Canada, and Brazil will see the feature for the first time. More countries will come later this year,” a Windows Live team member stated.