Contents

Know more about this
(or any other) subject?

Show off your know-how at Quamut Wiki.

Learn more with these titles from Barnes & Noble

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Plain and Simple

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Step by Step

Take Back Your Life: Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized

Previous:
The Outlook 2007 Interface

Next:
How to Check for New Email

How to Set Up Outlook Mail

Outlook is not itself an email service. Instead, it’s a way to send, receive, and manage the email accounts that you already use. These can include email accounts from various sources, such as:

Free web-based email providers: Such as Microsoft’s Hotmail® (www.hotmail.com), Yahoo! Mail® (mail.yahoo.com), and Google’s Gmail® (www.gmail.com)
Internet service providers (ISPs): Such as Comcast and Time Warner, who typically issue you an email account when you sign up for internet service
Work: An email address issued by a company to an employee to use for all work-related correspondence

Why Use Outlook to Manage Your Email?

There are three main benefits to using Outlook to manage your email:

It downloads all of your mail to your hard drive: As a result, you have no storage space restrictions, and you can search and access a complete archive of your email at any time, even if you’re not online. You can also create backup copies of all of your mail easily.
It lets you manage multiple email accounts: If you have more than one email account, Outlook will enable you to manage all of your emails in one place.
It improves security and privacy: Outlook 2007 includes advanced options for filtering email and preventing spam and other email-related problems.

How to Set Up Email Accounts in Outlook

If you’re using Outlook exclusively at work, you’ll likely be using what’s called a Microsoft Exchange Server® account and won’t need to set up your own. If you’re using Outlook at home, or if you’d like to add additional email accounts to Outlook at work (if your employer allows you to), you’ll first need to tell Outlook some information about each of your existing email accounts.

Automatic Account Setup

Unlike previous versions of Outlook, Outlook 2007 can usually detect all of the settings and information it needs about your email accounts with just your name, email address, and password. This makes setting up accounts in Outlook much easier than it used to be:

In the top toolbar, click Tools > Accounts > Add.
In the Account Settings dialog box, click New. The Add New Email Account dialog box will pop up.
In the Add New Email Account dialog box, check the box next to Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP, or HTTP and click Next.
Enter your name, email address, and password and click Next.

At this point, Outlook will communicate with your email provider to finalize your account setup. If you’d like to set up more than one account, just repeat the steps above for each account.

If Automatic Account Setup Fails

If Automatic Account Setup fails, it’s usually for one of two reasons:

Your email provider prohibits POP mail access: Some free email service providers—including Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail—will only let you manage your free email account in Outlook for an additional annual fee. Currently, the only exception among major free email providers is Gmail. To sign up for an account that lets you use Outlook to manage your mail, use Gmail, search online for free POP email providers (POP is the type of email account you’ll want), or pay the fee required to upgrade your service to enable POP mail.
Outlook can’t detect the required settings: If Outlook fails due to a problem communicating with your provider’s server or with finding the settings it needs, an alert will pop up. Your best option in this case is usually to configure your account manually. To do so, follow the setup steps above, but in Step 4 click the box in the bottom left corner of the dialog box that says, “Manually configure server settings . . .”. If you don’t know your provider’s server settings, contact the provider directly to obtain the settings info you need to use your account with Outlook.