Guide to Setup Gmail IMAP in Outlook 2010

Guide to Setup Gmail IMAP in Outlook 2010

Gmail is one of the email services which supports IMAP feature which enables to send and receive emails from Outlook without any ads. Besides one use Outlook for all the business mails and now you can also add your personal gmail account along with it. The advantage of having setup this using IMAP is that when you read a mail or delete a mail, it is synchronized with both the web version of Gmail and the Outlook.

There are lots of features which are different in the new Outlook from Office 2010 than Outlook 2007 which makes it even more desirable to use Outlook for your Gmail.

Having said that, now lets see How to Setup Gmail IMAP in Outlook 2010?

Before you can start using Gmail IMAP in Outlook, we need to enable IMAP in Gmail settings.

In Gmail, go to Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP –> Make sure Enable IMAP is checked and click on Save Changes if you made any.

If you are starting the Microsoft outlook 2010 for the first time, you will be seeing the following startup screen, just click Next and choose Yes in the next screen where they ask would you like to configure an email account?

Note: If you already have another email account or if you have chosen No in the earlier case and has already gone through the initial outlook startup settings before, follow this screenshot else continue to the next one.

Click the Office button on the top left corner and go to the Office Backstage. Under Info –>Account Information –> Click Account Settings and Click on Add Account. 

On the Add New Account screen, just choose Manually configure server settings or additional server types and click Next.

Choose Internet E-mail, connect to POP or IMAP server to send and receive e-mail messages and click Next.

Here give the User information, enter your Name, your full email address including @gmail.com or your @custom-mail.com.

Under Server information,

Account Type – IMAP

Incoming mail server – imap.gmail.com

Outgoing mail server (SMTP) – smtp.gmail.com

Also enter the logon information, enter your user name in full and enter the password.

NOTE: Now don’t click Next yet, click on More settings above it.

In the Internet email settings, go to Advanced Tab to change the server port numbers.

Change Incoming server (IMAP) to 993 and use SSL as the encrypted connection.

Change outgoing server (SMTP) to 587 and use TLS as the encrypted connection.

Now go to Outgoing server tab and check My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication and choose Use same settings as my incoming mail server.

Now you should be taken back to the Add new account screen, click on Test Account Settings and see if everything works without any errors. If there are any errors go back to all the settings and recheck if you have entered correctly.

Click Ok and Finish.

Now you will be taken to the main Outlook window and on the left sidebar a new set of folders will be created to synchronize with the Gmail account. It will also include Drafts, Sent Mail, Spam, Starred, Trash and all other mails synchronized.

Note: If you have a huge Gmail account already, then it will take sometime to download all your email contents from the web server.

 

Setting up the Sent Items Folder

When you send a mail for the first time, it will ask you where to store the sent mails. Make sure you DO NOT SET the sent mail from Gmail. When you send a mail through outlook, it goes to the gmail server and it saves the sent mails automatically to the sent mail folder. Now if you try to save it again in the sent mail, it will create duplicate copies of the sent mails. So use the Local Folder. See my other post on Choosing the Sent Items Folder while using Gmail in Outlook

Setting up the Deleted Items Folder

In gmail, you can either archive a mail or delete a mail. When you archive a mail, they are removed from the Inbox but they still remain in All Mails folder but when you delete they are moved to the trash mail folder and eventually deleted permanently after 30 days.

Likewise, you can set the action to move the mails to trash folder when you delete them.

If you want to archive a mail but not delete it, I usually have a folder called arhive and move the mails there so that my inbox remains clean and concise.

Folders and Labels

Outlook Folders are equivalent of labels in gmail. If you add a mail to two labels it will be present in both the folders.