Using Live/Hotmail/MSN for SQL Server 2008 Database Mail

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Over the weekend, I was playing around with trying to use my hotmail email account for SQL Server 2008 Database Mail. After searching, I found a promising post on the MSDN Forum under SQL Tools. In the forum posted, it was suggested that you need to use a premium account – this is not true. What you need to know is that on the account page, you need to leave the Display name and Reply e-mail fields blank for the DB Mail to successfully send emails and shown below:

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For some reason, adding the Display name or Reply e-mail causes email server to reject the email with an error message that looks like this:

The mail could not be sent to the recipients because of the mail server failure. (Sending Mail using Account 1 (2009-03-27T20:50:40). Exception Message: Cannot send mails to mail server. (Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: 5.7.3 Requested action aborted; user not authenticated).

Knowing the Server name for MSN,Live,Hotmail as smtp.live.com and the Port number as 25 are also helpful. With this information, you can follow the step-by-step instructions configuring DB Mail that SQL MVP Pinal Dave posted on this blog.

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