The Gmail Outlook Connection (Sept 26, 2008)

We're here to make the Gmail Outlook connection. Gmail is Google's free mail service. Gmail provide over 5.5GB of storage, Google-style searching of messages, and automatic grouping of messages by conversation. It is a quality, fully-functional service (despite still being officially a beta product).

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Gmail is free. The service is supported by ads, but the ads themselves are small and not an in-your-face annoyance. Plus, because this is Google, the ads are targeted toward the subject of each message, so there's a reasonable chance they will be of interest to you.

Gmail works with Outlook for free too, making Gmail a great way to get a personal Outlook email account if you don't already have one. As of late 2007, Gmail supports both POP3 and IMAP access.

Where most other companies are charging a fee to allow Outlook or other mail programs to connect to your account, Google is free. Of course there is no guarantee that access to Gmail will remain free once the beta period is over, but since everything seems to be free from Google, I think we're safe on this.

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To use Gmail, you need to do four things:

Decide whether you want POP3 or IMAP access

Get a Gmail Account

Configure Gmail POP3 or Gmail IMAP access.

Configure Outlook POP3 or Outlook IMAP access.

Using Google Apps with Outlook

There's another way to use Gmail with Outlook, and that's to use Google Apps and the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook plug-in. To learn more about this alternate approach, click here.

Outlook and Gmail are now talking to each other properly. The connection is complete. From here you can:

Return to the main Mail Accounts page.
Return to the top of this Gmail Outlook Connection page.