Oh, so this is about your HOSTING COMPANY imposing limitations around email as part of their PCI Compliance changes.
This has nothing to do with Zen Cart at all.
Summary:
- You have an account with the hosting company, and have an email account as part of those services
- You are not presently using that email account directly
- Instead, you are using Hotmail to login and collect your emails for you, and show them in your hotmail account
- Your host is no limiting the methods by which you can collect emails, and is preparing to disable POP access, which is required by the Hotmail tools that login and pull your emails from your host into your Hotmail account.
- You also probably have your Hotmail set up to "send email as" your business email address, which possibly requires hotmail to login to your hosting company's server and send the email for you.
- Since your hosting company is requiring more secure logins, the "send as" option may no longer work either.
You have several options, which you will have to sort out with your hosting company:
- Login to your hosting company's mailserver yourself and read your emails there, yourself. Bypassing the use of Hotmail for your business email altogether.
- Perhaps your hosting company can set up an automated forwarder to push your emails directly to your hotmail account for you, entirely skipping the inbox on your hosting account's server
- Lobby Hotmail to enable secure means of providing their email collection services. Surely you're not the only person who's been faced with this sort of situation.
- Dump hotmail in favor of a more contemporary service, or as mentioned earlier, just use your hosting company's email directly, either via webmail or by logging in with a normal PC application or mobile device.
But, to clarify, none of this has anything to do with Zen Cart, nor with PCI Compliance related to your store. It's stuff your hosting company is imposing as part of THEIR efforts to attain PCI certification, which does of course benefit you in the end, since you do want your store running on a PCI Compliant host.
While what your host is doing with email seems a little excessive, it's certainly in your best interests, since it will make access to your email more secure, thus minimizing risks of hacking and so on.
In short, the problem here is really a technical limitation imposed on you by Hotmail. If you weren't married to Hotmail then none of this would be a problem.
