Hotwayd or the Highway

If you happen to have a Hotmail account like me (you shouldn't, really), you already know how hard it is, not to say impossible, to view and/or send emails if you want to bypass your favorite browser or... Outlook, and rather use your favorite mail client, under Linux preferably.

In this case, you may find Hotwayd very handy. It is a daemon (actually two of them: hotwayd and hotsmtpd) that you can use in order to retrieve your email using POP and to send it via SMTP. I discovered this project a year and half ago and it seems to be making its own way gently and surely (for example, only POP support was available by that time).

The install is straight-forward (especially if you use the RPM) and the developers plan to support IMAP "soon". It supports hotmail/msn/lycos/spray services.