Blog Potions

I have been using GMail and perhaps most bloggers are doing the same. Though I couldn’t make sure whether the majority of GMail users are using e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozzila Thunderbird. And personally, between the two e-mail clients I’ve mentioned, I prefer using Microsoft Outlook 2003 (I’m a little outdated here) because I’m a big fan of color-coded mails, Rules and Alerts and the e-mail signatures.

Anyway, I’m not going into those details with this post (we’ll do that blow-by-blow comparison in some future entries. What we’re going to detail on this entry is about configuring your GMail account with Microsoft Outlook 2003.

After installing Microsoft Outlook 2003 and running it for the first time, it will prompt you to configure a new account. Choose POP3 when asked to choose the server type. Follow the onscreen procedures to key-in the necessary information. When you come to the point where you’ll need to enter your GMail information, here’s what you’ll have to do.

1. Enter your name and e-mail in the User Information field.
2. For Incoming and Outgoing mail servers, key-in pop.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com respectively.
3. For your User Name, use your GMail login name including the @gmail.com part. Use your GMail password in the password field.

4. Click More Setting button to configure the other server details.
5. Click the Outgoing Server Tab and enable SMTP authentication.

6. Click the Advanced Tab and enable encryption on both Incoming and Outgoing servers. (Change Outgoing server port from 25 to 465 if you can’t communicate with your SMTP server).

7. Set Server Time Outs to at least 5 minutes.
8. Click OK and Test your Account Settings.