I had a look around and I think I found the answer to the above question. The answer happens to be there is no support for POP3 with Windows Live Custom Domains at the moment. I found the following piece of information here

"Right now these protocols are not supported for free or paying users.  We are evaluating adding these protocols to the product in the future, but likely as part of the above subscriptions.  We currently do support protocols for rich e-mail clients like Outlook and Outlook Express in the above subscriptions."

So as far as I can tell there is no POP3 support for paying or non paying customers at present. However IMHO using Outlook Connector seems to be good enough. You can also sync your calendar with Outlook by applying the workaround from the link above.

Most of the questions and answers about Windows Live Custom Domains can be found in that link above. 

In my previous post I said I will soon be trying Windows Live Custom Domains and this weekend I managed to have a play with it and I like it! Now I have all my emails for this domain on Windows Live and I can access my email via the Hotmail website, Outlook (will get to that in a minute) and can also have my email showing on my Windows Live home page which was one of my wish list items for Windows Live a while back nice!

I recently read on Lukas's blog the following:

"However their service with POP3 support is not free and a lot more expensive than even the Google premium service."  

I can't find any references to POP3 support whether free or not but you can use Windows Live Custom Domains with the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector which can be downloaded from here and can be used with Outlook 2003 & 2007. I've just tried using the outlook connector and it seems to work well with Outlook. Will update this post if I find any info on POP3 support. 

When I first started blogging about the Windows Live family of products I initially was very general and then I developed an interest in Live Search, now I think I've covered Live Search quite a bit and I feel ready to jump onto the next thing. On my list of things to checkout in the Windows Live family next

- Windows Live Gadgets (It's about time I started playing with these)
- Windows Live Domains

So expect some blog posts about these in the next few weeks

It looks like Microsoft is building another search engine? or perhaps revamping Live Search, not sure. But I guess we'll see.

I do have some thoughts about Live Search though and here they go. I don't think the problem with Live Search is it's algorithm or index or anything like that. I think it's the culture around it!

Those of you who read my blog would know that I've covered Live Search a lot and I like to think that I took a close look at it. IMHO, Live Search isn't lacking in features but it's lacking a lot of support! It doesn't seem to me that Live Search has had good coverage in the blog world by MS bloggers which I find a bit interesting! The other thing works at a disadvantage to Live Search is it's name! I can go and talk to some one and say I 'googled' blah blah, or they can say google this and this, but this wont work with Live Search, I cant go say I Live Searched this thing.. not easy to pronounce, same thing with yahoo, I don't feel it's very easy on the mouth!

Here are some naming suggestions (which are not really that great but I think illustrate my idea)

MS Can buy www.find.com (I mean the domain name and not the actual site) and name it's search Windows Live Find, then when someone is trying to search for something they can go Find it and when they do they can say, I found  it ...etc

My other naming suggestion would be, Windows Live Locate, and using www.locate.com (I mean the domain name and not the actual site) then they can use Locate it ...etc like I say in the find example. This could help MS substitute google as a search term... hence compete with the google culture.

Microsoft, I still love your search engine but you can do better, I hope you are listening!!!!

I've been using Sauce Reader for reading all my feeds till now and I want to move on but can't decide on what to use. What is everyone using out there.

The only 2 annoying things with Sauce Reader were it's a desktop thing so cant read all my feeds from anywhere without my computer, and a few crashes every now and then, other than that, I really liked using it.

I know of several other replacements to Sauce Reader such as FeedDemon that I can try, but I was thinking of an online reader, and so far, I am not impressed with any.

Here are the ones I tried and my thoughts about them.

Live.com : Can import my opml file and read feeds there but there are 3 problems.

1) Only partial content is shown

2) Can't read comments on posts

3) to read more you have to popup a new window 

BlogLines : Better than live .com but I don?t like the fact that

1) I don't like the frame set, the frame divider is far too thick

2) Again can't read comments on posts

NewsGator Online : Only tried the beta AJAX version of it. Better than the above two but

1) Seems a little bit slow

2) Again even though it does seem to have a comments section at the bottom it doesn't seem to grab any feed comments!

Google Reader : Not impressive at all, well not to me anyway, but it seems a lot of people like it out there. Problems:

1) I don't like the UI, colours are just bad, consistent with GMail colours but used the wrong way around I think.

2) Comments, comments, comments, where are they, why are ALL online readers I've tried missing comments.

Are online readers a bad idea? Is there anything better that I haven't tried out?
It looks like I might give up the whole online RSS reader thing and just stick with something like FeedDemon.
If I have to choose from the above I would go for the NewsGator one, but still it feels like the best of the worst to me.

I'm not sure why I haven't done this previously but I'm now registered on Linked In! Will add the link to my blog soon, I'm slowly adding people I know to my list but you could make this easier for me by adding me too

I was going to write about this in the past before all the issues I had with my blog but it looks like it's good I didn't! It just got a loot easier. A couple of months ago I was trying to play with the MSN Search Web service to see if I can add search functionality to my site.

I tried to do so by following this article, and my advice is, don't! Back then I got a bit confused by it and it seemed that some info was missing. Also a lot of the components such as the AntiXSS library were not even included and you had to search for them to get them included.

Now you don't have to do any of this! Thanks to this download. The download includes all the files you need to get the search functionality included in your site.

The only thing you need to do is go and grab a search API ID from here and place that into your source code, you can either do this by adding a key with the obtained value into your Web.Config file or by entering the value in the appropriate place in the SearchProxy.aspx file, and this should be all! Well almost!

The only thing left to do from here is that you specify which site/sites you want the search to operate on this is done by replacing the following code that exists in the Default.html file in the source downloaded from the link mentioned earlier, with the values that you want.

var sc = new searchClient('keyAndCount', 'returnArea', "(site:www.dan.net.nz)");

So in this case I've set that value to search my blog site.

I wish I've seen this stuff a few month ago! Would have made my experimentation a lot easier

If this works then I'm back up and running again! Had a few blog issues since my (now deleted) Live Search Gadgets post, which screwed up my blog template for posting which in turn made Windows Live Writer unhappy. Now I'm upgraded to dasblog 1.9 and it will hopefully be all good!

I look forward to more blogging soon.

I just noticed that Rod has started blogging about Xero.

I cant think of what more to say in this post so go read what Rod has to say about Xero.