Remove Hotmail frames

Notice: Microsoft has completely removed the frames from Outlook 2002's hotmail support. You'll see the empty frame flash on the screen then no frames - this is because the frameset is in a dll on your computer. A future upgrade may replace the dll and fix this behavior.

If you've changed the Internet security zone settings to disable active scripting, you'll need to add *.msn.com and *.microsoft.com to Trusted zone or your mail will not display in the view control after going to full windows size.

For those unfamiliar with the framesets or the old design, this screen shows it at it's worst, in the late days of the beta and early days of the release. It was replaced by a cleaner design before being removed completely in the early months of 2002.

If you didn't want to have your screen taken up by the extra panels, you had three ways to remove the extra frames. These are no longer needed, but some might find the first method useful.

Since the hotmail display is done using the Outlook view control embedded in a webpage, you can view hotmail in any Outlook folder. Add a new folder named "Hotmail Inbox" to your default pst and set a folder homepage for it, and you avoid the flash of the frameset and won't need to open the hotmail folders.

If you have a *.pst or Exchange mailbox in your profile (in addition to the hotmail folders), you can create a folder home page for a folder in a pst or mailbox to view the Hotmail Inbox created from the view control code below. (You cannot change the home page for any hotmail folder.)

View Control code. Paste the following code in notepad and save as hotmail.htm, set the file to be a home page. To set a folder home page, right click on a folder in Outlook, choose properties, select Home Page tab.

To View other folders besides the Inbox, you need to create additional folders and HTML pages to use as folder home pages, editing the source code so the control uses another folder:

<PARAM NAME="Folder" VALUE="\\Hotmail\Junk Mail">

Your Hotmail is not stored in this new folder, it's just a view of the original hotmail folder.

If your address bar jumps around when Hotmail folders are selected, adjust the address bar so drop down and white square seen in this screen shot disappear. This works for all folders, not just hotmail mailbox folders.