Today Outlook.com, Microsoft’s free web-based e-mail service and evolution of hotmail.com after Microsoft bought the equally named service in 1997, received support for IMAP (protocol for e-mail retrieval – and manipulation) and OAuth 2.0 (an authorization standard.). Outlook.com is reported to have a user base of over 400.000.000 accounts.

This could be interesting for IMAP-based services or clients lacking Exchange ActiveSync support or for which POP (retrieval only) won’t suffice. They can now provide IMAP-based services or applications which can not only operate with on-premises Exchange, Office 365 or 3rd party e-mail systems, but also mailboxes hosted on Outlook.com.

Here is the information to set up IMAP (and SMTP for sending out e-mail) services in your application or service:

IMAP

• Incoming IMAP mail server: imap-mail.outlook.com
• Incoming IMAP mail server port: 993
• Encryption: SSL

SMTP

• Outgoing SMTP mail server: smtp-mail.outlook.com
• Outgoing SMTP mail server port: 587
• Encryption: TLS