Why and how you should switch your ISP Email to…

Ok so I work for Hotmail, and this might sound me I’ve been drinking the company kool-aid but hear me out. If you’re using Gmail or Yahoo! then you can also tune out now, I’ll tackle that conversation for another day! But if you’re using a random ISP and you have your own domain name then read on. When I joined 8 months ago I was using an ISP that gave me POP3, IMAP and Web access to my email, that’s pretty good. But my contacts were only stored on my laptop, so if I lost it or it was stolen they’d be lost completely. I got a bit of spam, nothing excessive but my ISP didn’t do anything special to tackle the problem. And my personal email was mixed up with my work email which was starting to get frustrating as tassography.com has become more popular. So I switched my email across to Hotmail using Windows Live Custom Domains and now I have almost zero spam, my Calendar\Contacts\Email are available from multiple places, it’s all separate from my work email and completely transparent to anyone who sends me email. I’ve also switched over my Mother’s domain across and she’s been particularly pleased with the reduction in spam. Basically all your email gets delivered to Hotmail’s servers and you access it through any of multiple methods Hotmail provides. Most importantly, your email address does NOT change. Anyone receiving your email will also be unaware of the change. Here’s how it’s done, it’s not hard but it requires some basic understanding of how email works. You can revert the change, so don’t worry if it doesn’t work out for you. Setup up a Windows Live Account First you need a Windows Live Account that you’ll use to manage everything. You can use your existing email address (lets say ben@mydomain.com) or any existing Windows Live account you already have, such as one for Instant Messenger or Hotmail. Sign up here if you need one http://login.live.com/. Moving your Domain to Windows Live Next you’re going to update your ISPs servers to deliver email to Windows Live’s servers. When anyone tries to send you an email it looks up this address so it knows which servers to send the email to. This is pretty easy to do but you’ll need to be able to update the DNS records for your ISP, most have a website for doing this. In technical terms you’re going to change the MX records for your Domain in DNS. Go to http://domains.live.com/ click on “Get Started” and enter the details in this form:

Next login with the account you created above and accept the terms & conditions. You’ll now be presented with instructions on what to do next. The most important part is these details:

Now you go to your ISP and update the DNS settings for your domain. Every ISP is different but they should have an option for managing your DNS and you’ll hopefully get to a screen like this:

In the example above, you remove the existing MX record, and add the new one using the settings from the Live Domains page (shown above). Double check everything you do because the settings have to be exactly the same. Next you need to wait a period of time whilst the records are update in DNS, the ISP I did this with says it takes 20 minutes. So I’d wait a while before going to the next step, you can check to see if it’s happened using this website. Simply enter your domain name, and select MX record, if the update has happened it should match the details you entered. When it’s all gone through, you go back to http://domains.live.com , login and click the Refresh button. If everything has been set correctly you should see this message:

If you don’t see this, then go back and check the settings you enter on your ISPs website, and use ZoneEdit to check it’s all setup correctly. Remember it can take some time for things to replicate around the internet. Don’t worry during the move your email is safe, when the change occurs it just stops being delivered to your ISP and starts being delivered to Windows Live. Setting up your Email Ok so now you can setup the accounts for your domain. You simply go to the Member accounts option, click add and follow the instructions, repeat this for all the accounts you need.

Now you’re all set and can start using your Email Ok so now you have your mail box setup, you can check your email from anywhere on the web, using any of these options:

Windows Live Hotmail
Windows Live Mail which is part of Windows Live Essentials
Outlook plus Outlook Connector, which is also part of Windows Live Essentials
Any Windows Mobile Phone
Plus more options coming online all the time…

Personally I user all of these methods because everything’s stored in the Cloud and what you see is consistently across all these methods. Give it a try, I promise you won’t regret it!

Why and how you should switch your ISP Email to Hotmail!