Outlook tutorial
How email and Outlook work
Microsoft Outlook is the most popular email program today. Microsoft Outlook is part of Microsoft's Office software suite. The Outlook email client can be used to read, send and manage email messages. Microsoft Outlook offers extensive possibilities for managing one or more email accounts. In this Outlook email tutorial you will learn
- How emails are sent and received between computers and email servers
- How to configure an email account in Outlook
- How to send messages
- How to manage email messages
- How to create an email backup and restore it later
The examples in the Outlook email tutorial are taken from Outlook 2003, but they apply to other versions of Microsoft Outlook as well. In this tutorial I will assume you are using a POP3/SMTP email environment. This is the most common email environment.
Email protocols
Most email environments use two protocols. One for sending mail and one for receiving mail messages. A protocol is a set of rules and agreements that computers use to communicate with eachother. This web page for example was sent to your computer using the http protocol. For receiving mail messages the Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) is often used. For sending email messages the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used.
This Outlook email tutorial teaches you how to configure you email account using a POP3 and SMTP server. Most ISPs and other email providers use these protocols.
Retrieving email messages via POP3
Microsoft Outlook is an email 'client'. Clients are programs that communicate with servers. The Outlook email client communicates with an email server to retrieve messages. It uses the POP3 service that is offered by the server computer to check if there are new messages on the server and if so, to download the new messages to your computer so that Outlook can display them. The image below shows how retrieving email messages via POP3 works.
The process illustrated in the image above shows how email messages are transfered to the user's computer via the POP3 protocol. The offline storage of email messages is an important feature of email client. It allows you to read your email messages offline once they are downloaded. An added advantage is the possibility to create and restore offline email backups.
Once downloaded, email messages are usually removed from the server, but this is a matter of preference. Outlook and other email clients can be configured to instruct the server to leave the messages on the server after they have been downloaded.
If you want to use POP3 for retrieving email messages you need an email server that supports it. Many internet service providers (ISPs) offer POP3 email accounts as do most email providers. Hotmail is an exception to the rule. POP3 is only available for paying Hotmail users. Users with a free Hotmail account will have to do with the web based email interface at hotmail.com. Gmail and GMX do offer POP3 access on free accounts.
Sending email using SMTP
Sending email is done via the SMTP protocol (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). It is actually too simple to justify another picture. Let me summarize what happens when you send an email message using SMTP.
- Create a new message in Outlook, enter a recipient address and hit the SEND button.
- Outlook contacts the SMTP server.
- The SMTP server decides whether the user is granted access to the server or denied.
- If access is granted, the email message is transfered from Outlook to the SMTP server.
- The SMTP server sends the message to the recipient email address.
SMTP authentication
There are a number of ways the owner of an SMTP server may authenticate its users. A username and password can be set for each user, or sometimes the client's IP address is used to decide whether access is granted or denied. ISPs know what IP addresses are in use by their subscribers. They can use this knowledge to block or grant access based on IP address if they want to grant access to their subscribers only. In this Outlook email tutorial I will use an SMTP server that doesn't require a password or a specific IP address (range).
Servers and services
In this tutorial I use two separate server servers: an SMTP and a POP3 server. Please note that POP3 and SMTP are actually services. The SMTP and POP3 server programs can be run either on the same physical machine, or on two separate machines. It is actually possible to install a POP3 server and a SMTP server on your own computer and send an email message from one email account to another on the same machine. Most IPSs I know offer both a POP3 server for retrieving mail and an SMTP service for sending mail. Some email providers however, offer only POP3 and no SMTP.
Multiple accounts in Outlook
In this Outlook tutorial I will configure just one email account. Outlook does however allow you to configure multiple email accounts. If you configure multiple accounts in Outlook, the POP3 settings for each account will be different. Each account connects to a certain POP3 service using its own username and password. However, all email accounts can use one single SMTP server for sending messages!
This concludes my introduction on how email (and especially POP3 and SMTP) works. On the next page of this Outlook email tutorial I will show you how to set up an email account in Outlook 2003.