IMAP on Mac mail

Since outlook now support IMAP protocol, I set up my hotmail account on Mac mail with IMAP using guidelines given by microsoft on these pages

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/forum/mail-email/how-to-set-up-mac-mail-to-sync-your-outlookcom/afdfe981-20c7-4d4a-b6b1-9329b27f018a

and

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/send-receive-from-app

After a long time (12 hours or so) and some help on my part (refreshing, asking for sync every half hour etc.) all my folders are loaded and mails downloaded.

However now that all is downloaded, the sync is very very slow (sometimes after an hour of "loading", the syncing is not done) and sometimes it throw this error :

"Unable to open "hotmail"

The connexion to the server "imap-mail.outlook.com" on port 993 has expired"

Is that something that is currently being resolved (as stated in some of the other topics) or is there another problem on my part

Thanks in advance for your help,

M.

PS : my hotmail inbox has got something like 10000 messages in different folders