Introduction to Outlook 2007 – Connect Outlook to a Web-Based Email Account
To use Outlook as an email program, you need to configure it to work with one or more email accounts. The best type of account for that is a free Google Gmail account. In case you’re wondering, Gmail is a Web-based email service available through Google. If you have a Gmail account (or get one, which only takes a few minutes), you can use it to connect Gmail and Outlook. Once you have that connection set up properly, people can email you at your Gmail address, and you can read it in Outlook. Going the other way, you can use Outlook to reply to your Gmail messages, or compose new messages that get sent using the Gmail account.
Why use Gmail? There are certainly lots of other free email accounts out there, like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. But connecting them to Outlook for free is another story. Some of the email accounts you can get for free are set up so you can view them using your Web browser, but they don’t allow you to connect to them with programs like Outlook. Others (Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, for example) allow you to connect to them with Outlook, but only if you pay for your email account. With those services, the free versions of the email account need to be upgraded to a paying version to enable the connection. There aren’t that many Web-based email accounts that provide free connections to Outlook. Google’s Gmail is the biggest and best of this select group.
Gmail gives you a huge amount of free storage for your email right on the Google computers. Gmail also provides powerful search capabilities when you search your mail through the web interface (basically doing a Google search on your own email). It supports this service through advertising, but you only see the ads when you view your Gmail account using your Web browser, not when you use Outlook. Google’s Gmail is definitely the free email service of choice for connecting to Outlook.
The directions for making the Gmail Outlook connection are moderately difficult, but most people can make the connection on their own especially if they have access to someone more experienced should they get stuck. If you want to try setting up a Gmail account & connecting it to Outlook 2007, the instructions are posted here.
Configuring Gmail and Outlook to work together is just one of the things covered in the first lesson of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. If strengthening your Microsoft Outlook 2007 skills in this time of uncertain job prospects makes sense to you, I suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more.