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MailGate Support Issues

Q. Why can't Outlook Express collect from my Hotmail account through MailGate?
A. The MailGate Web proxy supports standard HTTP traffic only. Because Outlook Express doesn't use standard HTTP to communicate with the Hotmail server, connections are not currently supported by the MailGate Web proxy.

The two following methods provide a way of getting around this

Socks
You can run Outlook Express via a Socks client, details of how to do this can be found here.

Custom proxy
The only alternative to Socks is to create a custom proxy in MailGate, allowing HTTP requests to be passed to the remote server directly, without going through MailGate's Web proxy.

One problem with this solution is that Outlook Express uses the same connection settings as Internet Explorer.

Custom proxies require a specific server name/IP address to pass the requests to (which in this case is the Hotmail server). As you'll need to set Internet Explorer to point to the custom proxy, this will mean that Web browsing via IE is not possible - due to all requests being passed to the Hotmail server. This shouldn't cause problems if you use an alternative browser such as Mozilla or Opera.

To create a custom proxy, do the following:
  1. Click on Edit | New | Custom Proxy.
  2. Set the title to "Hotmail".
  3. Set "This proxy listens on port" to "80".
  4. Set "Valid requests are passed through to" to "law15.oe.hotmail.com".
  5. Set "On port" to "80".
To enable other users to browse the Web, you'll need to make sure that MailGate's Web proxy runs on another port (e.g. 8080). To do this, click on Gateway | Setup | The Web, and set "Run HTTP proxy on port" to "8080". You'll need to stop and restart the MailGate service for these changes to take place.

Also, the client machines will need to have their browsers updated to point to port "8080" for HTTP rather than port "80". Machines requiring Outlook Express connections to Hotmail can use an alternative browser set to use this port.


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