How to Configure Outlook: Setting Up Outlook 2010

Microsoft Outlook is powerful email software. The numbers are hard to pin down exactly, but Computerworld reported earlier this year that Gmail has 425 million users, Yahoo Mail has 298 million and Hotmail had 325 million users. Over 100 million use Outlook, and 60 million choose Outlook.com as their email client.

For this article, we are using the 2010 Windows version. You can buy it as a stand-alone product, or as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 Suite. We’ll take a look at the steps you must take to get establish an Outlook account, and start to send and receive emails.

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Set Up Account

Open Outlook, go to “File” tab, click it and find the “Info” selection on the left hand side. Click that tab and then click the “Add Account” button. Add your name and email address. Plug in a password. Click “Manually configure service settings.”

Next you must choose a service. On the next screen select “Internet email,” and fill in the following information on the following screen. For “Server Information,’ make sure account type is “POP 3,” unless your provider has instructed otherwise. For incoming mail server, the format is likely “mail.yourdomaindomain.com,” where “yourdomain” is your specific site domain. An example is “mail.example.com.”

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For the “Outgoing mail server (SMTP),” enter the details of your email service provider. It might be in the format of smtp.yourISPdomain.com–an example is “smtp.attworldtech.com.” Under “Logon information,” enter the full email address in the format of [email protected]. Make sure to include the full domain path after the @ sign. Enter a Password. Click the check box to remember the password.

Make sure “Require logon using Secure Password Authorization (SPA) is not checked. You have the option to “Test Account Settings” by clicking the button, or you can tick the check box that says “Test Account Settings by clicking the Next button.” Click “More settings.”

Add a description of the email account. It might be “Work,” “Jim’s Email Account,” or whatever makes sense for your situation. Also add an organization name if desired. For the Outgoing Server tab, make sure “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication” is checked. Click “Next” and confirm that everything is correct by clicking “Next.” Click “Send and Receive all folders” to make sure the email is coming in. Outlook will send you a confirmation email to indicate you have set up the software correctly.

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Setup Outlook With Gmail

Many users like to use Outlook in concert with Gmail. To do so, first you need a working Gmail account. Open Gmail, enter your username and password, and sign in. Click “Settings” in the top right hand corner of the screen. Go down and select “Forwarding and POP/IMAP,” and then move down and click the radio button to “Enable IMAP.” Save all the changes and then sign out.

Go to Outlook and start the program. Open the “File” tab as discussed earlier. In this case, your email address is your Gmail address. Under “Server Information,” for “Account Type” select IMAP (instead of POP3). For “Incoming mail server,” enter imap.gmail.com. The “Outgoing mail server” is smtp.gmail.com.

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“User Name” is the complete email address–in this case your Gmail address–the “Password” is your Gmail password. Select “More Settings,” and then select the “Outgoing Server” tab. Make sure the “My outgoing server requires authentication” tickbox is checked.

Select the “Advanced” tab and change the Incoming server (IMAP) port to 993. Change the encryption type to SSL here, and below that line for the Outgoing server as well. For the Outgoing server (SMTP) port, enter 465.

Click “Test Account Settings” to make sure the connections are sound. If all is well, click Finish and emails should start to come in from Gmail to your Outlook Inbox.

As you can see, Outlook is easy to setup and configure. It works well with many email clients like Gmail and Yahoo Mail, and Microsoft continues to release new versions that will keep your investment sound well into the future.