What it is: The Hotmail Gadget allows you to check your Hotmail email account without leaving your Google Personalized Homepage (iGoogle). It was developed because many of us cannot stop using our Hotmail address but wanted a way to access it from our iGoogle homepage. You can read and write emails, view and edit contacts and access all your folders.

How it works: The gadget uses the MSN Mobile page to get into Hotmail. That means that what you get within the gadget is the same as if you checked your Hotmail on your PDA or mobile phone. For convenience, we've added a couple of links on top to save you scrolling to the bottom all the time. Also, we have a feature to refresh the Inbox periodically to check for new emails.

Security: Your username and password are submitted directly to MSN Passport, the gadget has no access to them.

How to get it: Click here to add the gadget to your iGoogle homepage.

Cookies: You will have to accept third-party cookies from the following domains for the gadget to work correctly:

  • live.com
  • mid.live.com

Refresh: The Refresh feature is still somewhat experimental. Because of cross-site scripting restrictions in JavaScript, there is no way to determine which page is currently being displayed. What this means is that the refresh is triggered even when the user is reading or composing an email. The refresh then changes the current page to Inbox. To get around this, a visible but unobtrusive message is displayed for 7 seconds warning the user that refresh is about to take place with an option to cancel it. If uncancelled the refresh takes place automatically.

Font, CSS requests: A lot of people have asked for a "nicer" font. Unfortunately, there's nothing that can be done to change the appearance of the Hotmail pages themselves, they come from MSN and we have no control over them.

The good news: Several Greasemonkey scripts are available which set a nicer font and form elements, hide the Hotmail logo, the ad at the top, and a couple of other neat things.

Another workaround: change the default font of your browser. In Firefox this is done in Tools > Options > Content. In Internet Explorer, Tools > Internet Options > General.

Finally, if you know of any way to change the appearance of an external page within an IFRAME please let us know (as far as we know, this is prevented by JavaScript XSS restrictions in all browsers).

Get in touch: Do let us know if you like the gadget or if you have ideas how to make it better. The contact address is hotmail@mysocialgadget.com.