In days gone by it was normal for ISP’s to provide a setup disk for their customers that set up all the necessary parameters for them to access their E-mail using Outlook Express. However now that many more people are using the Full blown version of Outlook, they are finding they have to set up their own E-mail accounts, as many ISP’s will not support the use of Outlook.
Also, it’s more common these days for people to have their own hosting and domain names, meaning they need to set up their own accounts.
In this tutorial we will show you how to set up a typical POP3 / SMTP E-mail account, providing you have the necessary information from your ISP / E-mail provider.
The Information you will need to know is: Username, Password, Incoming Mail Server, Outgoing Mail Server.
For our example we will use the following information
- Username: chimpytech
- Password: office
- Incoming Mail Server: mail.myhost.com
- Outgoing Mail Server: mail.myhost.com
If you are setting up an account provided by your ISP the Incoming and Outgoing mail servers are likely to be the same, if you’re setting up an account using your own hosting package it’s quite normal that you use your ISP’s mail server for your outgoing mail, but you will need to check with your domain host and / or ISP to be sure.
Setting up your account
- Open Outlook, and select E-mail Accounts from the Tools menu.
- Select the radio button to ‘Add a new e-mail account‘ and click ‘Next‘
- In the next screen select the POP3 option, and click ‘Next‘
You will now be presented with the screen below where you will need to enter the data specified.
Your name: This is how you would like your name to appear on the screen
E-mail address: Enter the full e-mail address for the account you are setting up.
User name: This is the username that has been supplied to you by your ISP or setup by you or your domain host.
Password: The password used for this E-mail address – You can opt to leave this blank, and Outlook will prompt you for the password each time you send or receive e-mail. (Un-ticking ‘Remember password’ does the same thing)
Incoming mail server: The name of the incoming server supplied by your ISP / Host
Outgoing mail server: The name of the outgoing mail server supplied by your ISP / Host
The option for logging on with Secure Password Authentication is rarely used, if you need it your ISP / Host should tell you, if you’re not sure, ask them.
Once you have entered all these details you should be able to click the ‘Test account settings‘ button and send yourself an E-mail. If everything works fine, you will see an E-mail in your Inbox from yourself with a test message. If you don’t see the message, then re-check all your settings, and try again. If things still don’t work we suggest you contact your ISP / Host to confirm you are entering the correct information, and also check that they don’t require an Authenticated SMTP server to send mail (See notes later in the tutorial on Authenticated SMTP)
Fine Tuning
Once you have set up your E-mail account you will probably want to tweak a few settings to get the best from it.
Click on the ‘More Settings‘ button, where you will now be presented with the E-mail settings dialog, which will allow you to make some minor changes to the way your accounts work.
- General – This is where information regarding your Account is held and can be changed. It makes sense to give your E-mail account a meaningful name so that you can tell which account is which if you have more than one account
- Outgoing Server – Some ISP’s are now demanding that users send E-mails using Authenticated SMTP as a means of reducing spam, if your ISP demands this you will need to enter the details they provide to you here.
- Connection – This is where you will tell Outlook how you want to connect to the internet to send your E-mail, normally you will be able to leave this alone as you shouldn’t need to change anything unless you have a specific reason to connect in a different manner.
- Advanced – The two main functions of this tab are to change the ‘port’ numbers for your E-mail account which is something we recommend you leave alone unless specifically instructed to change by your ISP.
The only other option you may want to play with is that of ‘Server Timeouts’. This is an indication of how long Outlook will spend trying to connect to your mail servers before giving you a time out error if it can’t connect. About a minute is usually enough for most people on some sort of DSL connection, but if you’re using a slower dial-up connection, and you have frequent ‘Time out’ errors then you might want to increase this period of time.
The last option on this tab is to ‘Leave your messages on the server’, unless you want to keep down loading your messages time and time again, un-tick the box for this option.