I have Outlook 2003 running on Windows XP, and a Windows Live Hotmail Plus account. Things had been going fine using Outlook Connector to view my Hotmail in Outlook, but three days ago the email stopped downloading into Outlook. I can still send email from Outlook, but I can't receive anything in there. The Hotmail account seems to be functioning just fine. Does anyone know how to re-connect the email downloads to Outlook? Thanks!1 person needs an answerI do too

I've run into this off-and-on myself. I think the Hotmail servers can be problematic from time to time. I find I can usually get things working again by deleting the account from Outlook, stopping and restarting Outlook, then readding the account. On rare occasion, I've had to uninstall and reinstall the Connector. I find the Beta 14 Connector to be more reliable in some regards, but it usually gives me a sync error, despite messages updating.Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]

Thanks for the info. But if you delete the account from Outlook, does it delete all the email in the Outlook Hotmail folders for that account? (I have tons of data in there and would hate to have to start from scratch and re-download all the data in my Hotmail account!) Or can you delete the account, then readd it and have it synch into the same Outlook folders on your harddrive that had the Hotmail email in them before you deleted the account (with just the non-duplicate email)? If so, would you be able to describe how you do that? Thanks again.Andrea

No, deleting the account doesn't affect the mailbox on the server. All you're doing is disconnecting Outlook from the server. Recreating the account will restore access to everything.Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]

I deleted and readded the account as you suggested, and it is functioning again. Thank you. But doing that did delete all the Hotmail email that was stored in my Outlook folders on my computer. Is there a way to delete the account without deleting all that data? It took hours to re-download!! I thought the Outlook folders were stored on my hard drive--so why do they delete when the account is basically just disonnected from the Hotmail server?

The OST file that the Outlook Connector creates is a cache that mirrors the contents of the Hotmail account on the server. Deleting a Hotmail account in Outlook also removes the cache. You can't change that. Moreover, there's no good way to import anything that was in a past OST if you saved it, since OSTs are connected to the account and uninstalling and reinstalling the Connector would have ruined that association.Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]

So what would happen if I copied the hotmail folders in Outlook into my personal folders?

You'd have local copies of the hotmail messages.Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]