Outlook.com is Microsoft’s web mail offering, which is now in direct competition with Google’s Gmail. Gmail has become the most popular email service, and it seems that Microsoft, too, wants its share in email service.
Outlook.com was launched more than a year ago, but now finally supports IMAP. People have been long requesting this feature, but the Redmond company has now finally listened to our prayers. IMAP, unlike POP protocol, syncs with third-party mail clients. This means that the changes you make to your desktop email client—like marking a message as read, deleting, or any other—those changes are synced back to your webmail account, too. Those who prefer these changes to reflect on all their different devices prefer the IMAP way.
To configure Outlook.com with IMAP in Windows, you can use your preferred email client with the settings mentioned below. For this article’s sake, I am going to use Mozilla’s Thunderbird, but as long as you use these settings, you’ll be fine.
Incoming IMAP
- Server: imap-mail.outlook.com
- Server port: 993
- Encryption: SSL
Outgoing SMTP
- Server: smtp-mail.outlook.com
- Server port: 587
- Encryption: TLS
Configuring Outlook.com IMAP in Thunderbird
Launch Thunderbird, go to File > New > Existing Mail Account.
Enter your name, email address, password, check mark the “Remember password” field and then click on Continue.
Next, click on “Manual config” to configure Outlook.com manually.
Now all you need to do is to configure the incoming and outgoing fields as mentioned above, or, you can also check out the screenshot below and configure exactly these settings. Also remember to enter your full email address in the username field.
Once you’ve entered the settings, click on Done. That’s all you need to do. Enjoy your mail in your preferred email client with this method.
