Hotmail access “Forbidden”

As of September 1st, the old way of making a connection to Hotmail (via a protocol called WebDAV) has been discontinued. This means that as of now, when you are trying to connect to Hotmail via the build-in HTTP method in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007, you’ll get the following error;

Task 'Hotmail: Folder:Inbox Synchronizing headers.' reported error
(0x800CCC33) : 'Access to the account was denied. Verify that your username
and password are correct.The server responded 'Forbidden'.

(the actual reported error code may be different for you)

The only supported way of connecting to your Live Hotmail or MSN account is via the Outlook Connector or POP3.

The Outlook Connector is the recommended method and can be downloaded here.
The Outlook Connector is supported for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. If you are running an earlier version of Outlook, you can still connect to your Hotmail account via POP3. The settings can be found here.

Keep in mind that POP3 is download only and it only supports downloading mail from your Inbox folder (sending mail remains possible as well of course).
If you need full mailbox or contact and calendar syncing support and updating to a later version of Outlook is not an option to you, you can still access your Live Hotmail mailbox via Windows Live Mail (free).
Using Outlook Express included in Windows XP or Windows Mail included in Windows Vista is not an option as they only support the WebDAV connection method to Hotmail servers.

Tip: If you don’t like the way that the Outlook Connector shows your entire email address as the name of the Hotmail folder list in your Navigation Pane, you can easily change that with the Live Hotmail Rename Tool (free).