I was asked a question today about how to set up a webmail (say hotmail or yahoo for example) with an email client. Having an email address that is personal and seperate from your ISP is a great idea and something that everyone who uses the internet should consider. Follow along as we set up a hotmail account and then add it to our email client.
The first step is to go to the site whose webmail that you wish to use (www.hotmail.com in my example).
You will now see the sign up page. Click Sign up and you will be brought to a page asking you to choose if you would just like Windows Live Hotmail or Windows Live Services (including Hotmail). Make your choice based on your needs, but if you have a blog or like to share photos I would advise you to choose Windows Live Services. For the purposes of this tutorial, I will choose Windows Live Hotmail.

At this point, you will enter your chosen name and in the case of hotmail, you are given the option of choosing yourname@hotmail.com or yourname@live.com. Enter your name and check whether it is available. Enter all of the pertinent information (password, name, etc.) and then click accept. You will then be brought to a screen asking you to choose if you want the Classic version (I recommend this if you have a slower internet connection) or the Full version (this provides very useful functionality).

That is all there is to setting up a webmail address. The various providers (Hotmail, Live, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) all follow similar formats. Now that you have your webmail set up, lets set it up in our email client. I use Outlook 2007, but the process is the same across different clients. If you use Windows Vista, but don't have Office 2007, you can use Windows Live Mail (a good program) which is included in Vista, or you can use Thunderbird a free download from www.mozilla.org.
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