All Your Emails In One

On Friday night I decided to start using Outlook on my computer at home. It was a very useful tool at work and I know that you can aggregate free email accounts. I have Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail accounts and it can be a pain to log on to all of them individually. So, I bit the bullet and set up Outlook such that all my emails would be in one place.

Hotmail was pretty straightforward as Outlook has it in mind specifically. You go to Tools/Email Accounts/Add a new email account. From here you choose HTTP Mail Service Provider as Hotmail and type in your logon details.

Yahoo! was more problematic. It has a POP/SMTP interface with standard ports of
110 and 25. Try as I might, and with hair being seriously pulled, it just wouldn't set up successfully. I found a most helpful setup page on the Web. The SMTP port required was 587, as it turned out. Once I'd changed this setting it worked fine.

Gmail has a rather helpful page to help you install the Gmail account on Outlook. Firstly, remember to enable POP then you configure the email client using the steps linked here.

It certainly makes life easier. I should have done it years ago.

Now, the next step is to import contacts from your free Web-based email accounts. Hotmail doesn't make it easy for you. I'll tackle this later as I haven't found anything that works easily. I guess that I'll be doing most of it by hand.