Hotmail is playing catching up game with Gmail. It has recently announced that POP3 technology is now available to Hotmail users in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. If you don’t see your country or region in this list, never fear, it is coming soon.

In a nutshell, POP3 is a protocol that allows almost any e-mail software program that you’ve installed on your mobile phone or PC to get messages from your e-mail inbox on the web and deliver them in the designated program.

Thus if you are eager to retrieve your Hotmail emails, this is how you set up Hotmail in the e-mail program on your PC or mobile device. You may be asked for the following information:

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)  
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)  
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

via [WindowsLiveWire]