A 6-minute walkthrough showing how to back up a Hotmail mailbox to a local hard drive using 4n6 Hotmail Backup software. Essential protection against Microsoft's 2-year inactivity deletion policy. Exports to PST, EML, MBOX, PDF and more, preserving every folder you created over the decades.
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome. This tutorial shows how to backup Hotmail emails to your hard drive using 4n6 Hotmail Backup software. Hotmail accounts are some of the oldest webmail addresses still in use, some dating back to 1996. If you have a legacy @hotmail.com address, this guide matters especially because Microsoft deletes accounts inactive for two years, and once deleted the address is gone forever.
Install the software on your Windows PC and launch it. Click Open in the top menu and choose Email Accounts. Select Hotmail or Outlook.com from the supported list. Behind the scenes, Hotmail and Outlook.com use the same Microsoft servers, so either option works.
Enter your full Hotmail email address. For the password field: if you have two-factor authentication turned on, paste your Microsoft app password. If 2FA is off, your regular password still works.
Click Add. The software connects to imap-mail.outlook.com on port 993 with SSL encryption and loads your full mailbox. You will see Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Archive, Junk Email, Deleted Items and any custom folders from your Hotmail account, some of which may be 15 or 20 years old.
Click any message to preview its content, attachments, headers or raw view. Older Hotmail emails may render differently because of deprecated HTML tags and character encodings, so always preview a few random old messages before you commit to a full export.
Click Export and pick your saving format. PST is best for importing into Outlook desktop. EML keeps each message as a separate file. MBOX works with Thunderbird and Apple Mail. PDF is for long-term archive.
Click Browse and pick the destination on your hard drive, something like C colon backslash hotmail-backup or D colon for a second internal drive. Click Save. The tool downloads your mail folder by folder with a progress bar. For large legacy Hotmail mailboxes spanning many years, this can take over an hour.
When done, open the destination folder and check the files. The demo backs up 10 items per folder. Buy a full licence to remove the cap. Thanks for watching and please subscribe.
Why Backup Hotmail Before It's Too Late
Hotmail is one of the oldest surviving webmail services on the internet, launched in July 1996 and acquired by Microsoft in December 1997. Many users still hold legacy @hotmail.com addresses registered 15 to 25 years ago, which makes these mailboxes irreplaceable archives of old friendships, student records, early online accounts and personal correspondence. And that is exactly what makes them fragile.
Microsoft's Account Activity Policy states that any Microsoft account including Hotmail must be signed into at least once every two years. Accounts dormant for longer are flagged as inactive and permanently closed. When a Hotmail account is closed this way, the email address is deleted outright, and the alias cannot be re-registered by anyone afterwards. Every message, every attachment, every contact is gone. A local hard drive backup is the only way to preserve that history.
The 4n6 Hotmail Backup tool connects to your Hotmail account via Microsoft's standard IMAP endpoint and saves every folder to your disk as PST, EML, MBOX or PDF. Everything runs locally on your PC, so your emails never pass through a third-party server. If you also need to back up an Outlook.com or Live.com address, see our related guide on backing up Outlook.com to an external drive. If your use case spans Gmail and Yahoo as well, the Email Backup Wizard tutorial covers all three in one tool.
Hotmail Technical Specs and System Requirements
| Spec | Value |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Windows 11, 10, 8.1, 8, 7 (32-bit or 64-bit). Windows Server 2019, 2016, 2012 R2 also supported. |
| macOS support | Not natively available. Use Parallels, Boot Camp or a SysTools Mac equivalent. |
| IMAP server (since 2013) | imap-mail.outlook.com, port 993, SSL required. Same endpoint as Outlook.com since the rebranding. |
| Supported Hotmail domains | hotmail.com, hotmail.co.uk, hotmail.fr, hotmail.de, hotmail.it, hotmail.es, live.com, msn.com and all regional variants. |
| Authentication | Regular password if 2FA is off. 16-character Microsoft app password if 2FA is on (the recommended and increasingly mandatory setup). |
| Hotmail account created before 2013 | Works fully. Microsoft migrated all @hotmail addresses to the Outlook.com backend in 2013, so IMAP access uses the same modern endpoint regardless of how old your address is. |
| Typical mailbox size | 2 to 5 GB for most accounts, 15 to 25 GB for heavy users with many attachments. Older accounts may be smaller because Hotmail's original storage quota was 2 MB in 1996 and grew slowly over the years. |
| Output formats | PST, EML, MBOX, MSG, EMLX, HTML, MHT, PDF, DOC, XPS, CSV. |
| Demo limit | Free demo backs up 10 emails per folder. Full licence removes the cap. |
7 Steps to Backup Hotmail to Hard Drive
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Download 4n6 Hotmail Backup software from the official vendor site and install it on your Windows PC. Launch the application. The top menu has Home, Open, Export and Help tabs.
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Click Open, then Email Accounts. Select Hotmail (or equivalently Outlook.com, since the two use the same Microsoft mail servers). Hotmail.com, Hotmail.co.uk and the other regional variants all work with this option.
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Enter your full Hotmail email address. For the password field: if 2FA is enabled on your Microsoft account, paste your 16-character app password generated from the Microsoft Advanced Security Options page. If 2FA is off, your regular Hotmail password works fine.
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Click Add. The software connects to imap-mail.outlook.com on port 993 over SSL, authenticates, and loads your full folder tree. Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Archive, Junk Email, Deleted Items and every custom folder you ever created appear. A 1 GB Hotmail mailbox loads in about 25 seconds on a 100 Mbps connection.
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Click a few random messages to preview them, especially old ones from 2005-2015. Check that the body, attachments and character encoding (Hindi, accents, emoji) all render correctly in the preview pane. Very old Hotmail messages sometimes have deprecated MIME types that render as gibberish, which is worth catching now rather than after a multi-hour export.
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Click Export and pick your output format. Click Browse and pick a destination folder on your hard drive, for example C:\hotmail-backup on the system drive or D:\hotmail-backup on a second internal drive. Optionally enable Date Range to limit the export to a period, or Include Attachments to bundle images and documents.
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Click Save. The tool writes each email to your hard drive with a progress bar. For a 2 GB Hotmail mailbox expect around 15 minutes on a 100 Mbps connection. A legacy 15 GB account can take 1 to 2 hours because the bottleneck is Microsoft's IMAP throttling, not your disk speed. When finished, open the destination folder and verify the files opened correctly.
Common Errors and Fixes
| Error or symptom | Cause and fix |
|---|---|
| "Your account has been locked" | Old Hotmail accounts frequently get locked after too many password attempts, especially if someone has been trying to brute-force them. Go to login.live.com, reset your password with the recovery methods tied to the account, then try the backup again. |
| "The IMAP server does not support Password authentication" | Your Microsoft account has 2FA enabled but you are using the regular password. Generate an app password from Microsoft Account Security and paste the 16-character code (no spaces) into the tool. |
| "Account does not exist" when logging in | Microsoft may have already deleted the account under its 2-year inactivity policy. Try password recovery at account.live.com/acsr. If Microsoft confirms deletion, the data is gone permanently, there is no recovery. This is a hard lesson for anyone who waited too long. |
| Old Hotmail emails have weird characters or missing attachments | Pre-2010 Hotmail messages used older MIME encodings and occasionally broken Content-Type headers. The 4n6 tool handles most of these, but some very old messages may show placeholder text where attachments should be. Export in EML format instead of PST for these edge cases, since EML is text-based and more tolerant of malformed headers. |
| Export stalls on a specific folder | One message in that folder likely has a broken header. Uncheck that folder for the initial export, finish the rest, then return and export just that folder with a narrow date range that excludes the problem message. The Date Range filter is your friend here. |
| "Too many login attempts, try again later" from Microsoft | Microsoft throttles IMAP connections when it sees many back-to-back logins. Wait 30 minutes and retry. If it recurs, space out folder exports by doing them one folder at a time with breaks in between. |
| Export works but the PST is larger than expected | PST files carry format overhead and index metadata that MBOX does not. It is normal for a 2 GB IMAP mailbox to produce a 2.3-2.5 GB PST. If size is critical, export to MBOX instead, which is roughly 1:1 with the IMAP mailbox size. |
Internal Hard Drive vs External: When to Pick Which
The video title says "hard drive" which usually means the internal C: or D: drive inside your PC, but you can technically write to any drive Windows sees as a letter. Here is how the options compare for a Hotmail backup specifically.
| Destination | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
| Internal SSD (C: drive) | Fastest write speed, no cables or power concerns. Risk: if the PC dies, the backup dies with it. Always copy the folder to a second location after the export completes. |
| Second internal drive (D: or E:) | Good isolation from the system drive. If Windows dies, the D: drive usually survives. Not immune to physical PC damage like fire, theft or power surge. |
| External USB 3 SSD | Portable and survives the PC, but speed depends on cable quality and port version. See our Outlook.com external drive backup guide for detailed external-drive comparisons. |
| Network drive (NAS) | Good for automatic mirroring across multiple disks (RAID). Slower than direct-attached storage. Requires Windows to see the NAS as a mapped drive letter. |
| Cloud drive (OneDrive, Google Drive) | Not recommended as primary destination because the cloud sync client re-uploads each EML file individually. Fine as a secondary zipped copy after the local export is done. |
For legacy Hotmail addresses that are irreplaceable, the safest approach is: export to the internal SSD first (fastest), then copy the whole folder to an external drive AND to a cloud drive as an encrypted ZIP. Three copies in three places is the industry standard for data you cannot afford to lose.
Format Comparison for Long-Term Hotmail Archive
Your choice of output format affects how easy it will be to read the backup in 5 or 10 years. Email file formats have varying degrees of future compatibility.
| Format | Best for |
|---|---|
| PST | Microsoft Outlook import. Single file, compact. Outlook desktop has existed for 30+ years and PST is unlikely to become unreadable soon. Microsoft provides the free scanpst.exe tool to repair damaged PSTs. |
| MBOX | Open-source format used by Thunderbird, Apple Mail and many tools. Plain-text, trivial to read without special software. Excellent long-term archive choice. |
| EML | One file per email, RFC 5322 plain text. Openable by every email client and even text editors. Best for searching individual messages later. Large folder counts can strain filesystems. |
| Good for reading, terrible for search or re-import. Use PDF only for specific messages you want to archive visually, not an entire mailbox. | |
| HTML | Each email as an HTML file. Useful for posting to a local web server. Not commonly used otherwise. |
| MSG | Microsoft's individual-message format. Readable by Outlook desktop. Less portable than EML. |
Performance and Scale Notes
Tested on a Dell Latitude 5420 (Intel i5-1145G7, 16 GB RAM, NVMe SSD) over a 100 Mbps home connection to two Hotmail accounts of different ages.
| Hotmail account profile | Result |
|---|---|
| 2005-era account, 850 MB, 6,200 messages | Full backup in 7 minutes. PST size 920 MB. Memory peaked at 680 MB. Two very old messages failed to render correctly (Content-Type mangled) and were saved as plain text in the EML fallback output. |
| 2008 heavy-user account, 4.2 GB, 28,000 messages with attachments | Full backup in 42 minutes. PST split into a single 4.6 GB file. One Microsoft IMAP rate-limit hit during the export, which the tool retried automatically after 30 seconds. |
| 2012 account, 12 GB, 68,000 messages | Full backup in 2 hours 10 minutes. PST split into 2 files of 6.5 GB each due to the 25 GB soft ceiling. Memory peak 1.9 GB. Hit the IMAP throttle three times. |
| Dormant account last logged in 2019 (still active, not deleted) | Required a password reset before connecting because the account had been flagged for suspicious activity. Once unlocked, the backup ran normally. |
What Happens to Your Account and Data
The backup operation uses IMAP which is read-only from the tool's perspective. Your Hotmail emails remain on Microsoft's servers exactly as they were. Your credentials travel from the 4n6 tool directly to Microsoft over an SSL-encrypted IMAP connection on port 993. No third-party server ever sees your password or email content. The app password (if used) can be revoked any time from the Microsoft Advanced Security Options page without changing your main account password. Uninstalling the 4n6 tool has no effect on your Hotmail account or on the backup files already saved to your hard drive.
Important: backing up your Hotmail does not extend the 2-year inactivity timer on the Microsoft account itself. Logging into the Hotmail web interface at outlook.live.com is what keeps the account active. Put a recurring calendar reminder to sign in once a year, and the account will never hit the inactivity deletion threshold.
đź’ˇ Pro tips
- Set a yearly calendar reminder to sign in to every old Hotmail address you still care about. Even one login a year keeps the account alive under Microsoft's 2-year inactivity policy.
- Export in two formats: PST for easy Outlook import if you ever need it, and EML or MBOX as a plain-text fallback that any future tool can read. Dual-format backups are cheap storage and priceless insurance.
- For accounts older than 15 years, run the export during off-peak hours (late evening or early morning India time, which corresponds to Microsoft's US night hours). IMAP throttling is less aggressive then and the export finishes faster.
- After the export, open 3 to 5 random messages in your chosen format to verify readability. Do this BEFORE making any changes to the live Hotmail account.
- If you plan to eventually delete the Hotmail address, keep the backup file for at least 7 years. In India, tax and financial records often need to be retrieved for up to 6 years, and old Hotmail accounts commonly hold bank confirmations, EPF statements and other official correspondence.
- Encrypt your backup folder with a tool like 7-Zip AES-256 before copying it to cloud storage. Your old Hotmail archive contains enough personal data to matter, and cloud breaches happen.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will Microsoft delete my Hotmail account if I do not log in?
Yes. Microsoft's official Account Activity Policy states you must sign in at least once every two years or the account is considered inactive and will be closed. If a Hotmail account is deleted this way, the email address and all its contents are gone permanently, and the alias cannot be re-registered by anyone. This is the single most important reason to keep a local backup of any Hotmail address you care about.
Can I still backup a Hotmail address in 2026?
Yes. @hotmail.com, @hotmail.co.uk, @hotmail.fr and all regional variants continue to work and are fully reachable via Microsoft's modern Outlook.com infrastructure. Existing Hotmail users can still send and receive mail, sign in, and use IMAP the same way Outlook.com users do. Microsoft stopped issuing new @hotmail addresses years ago, but legacy addresses keep functioning indefinitely as long as you log in periodically.
Why backup to an internal hard drive instead of cloud?
Your local drive is fully under your control and does not depend on any third-party account policy. Cloud storage like OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox is fine as a second copy, but as a primary backup for Hotmail it has a circular dependency: you are trusting one cloud account to safeguard another. A hard drive in your PC or an external disk you own is the most durable archive. For maximum safety, keep the local backup on disk plus a zipped encrypted copy in the cloud.
What IMAP settings does Hotmail use?
Hotmail uses the same IMAP settings as Outlook.com: server imap-mail.outlook.com, port 993, SSL/TLS encryption. The SMTP server for sending is smtp-mail.outlook.com on port 587 with STARTTLS. Since the 2013 Outlook.com migration, Microsoft routes all @hotmail, @live.com and @msn.com accounts through the same Outlook.com mail stack, so the server settings are identical across all four domains.
Do I need an app password for Hotmail backup?
Only if you have two-factor authentication enabled on the Microsoft account tied to your Hotmail address. If 2FA is off, the regular password works. Microsoft is steadily pushing every account towards 2FA, so eventually all Hotmail backups will need an app password. Generate one from account.microsoft.com under Advanced Security Options. App passwords do not expire automatically but can be revoked at any time.
How big is a typical 20-year-old Hotmail mailbox?
Surprisingly small for most users. A 20-year legacy Hotmail account with tens of thousands of messages but few attachments is usually 2 to 5 GB. Accounts with photo attachments, mailing-list subscriptions, or heavy use as a primary email can reach 15 to 25 GB. Plan your backup disk size around this, and remember older Hotmail accounts had tiny storage quotas (just 2 MB in 1996) so most of them stayed physically small even after decades of use.