Accessing Your Gmail Account Using Windows Mail
Windows Mail is the current successor to Microsoft Outlook and with it comes a slew of new features and options that make managing your email a lot easier. It still provides it’s basic functions and giving you access to your email to read and send it is what it is meant to do. This tutorial will show you how to setup a Windows Mail account to access your Gmail inbox so that you can read emails in your inbox as well as send them from your Gmail account name. By setting up a mail account you don’t even have to open up a web browser, all you have to do is load up Windows Mail and go from there.
Before we even begin to setup the account in Windows Mail we need to enable POP access inside of our Gmail account. This lets us retrieve emails from our Gmail account using an email client such as Windows Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird. If you aren’t signed in already to your Gmail account go ahead and login. Once you are logged in click on the settings tab located in the upper right hand corner of the screen. From there click the Fowarding and POP/IMAP tab and under the POP download area select either the first or second option depending upon which you prefer. You can also choose what you want to happen to the email on your Gmail account when it is retrieved from Windows Mail. Once you have selected those options click on Save Changes and load up Windows Mail.
Once Mail has opened up click on the Tools menu in the Main Menu bar and from the drop down select Accounts. An Internet Accounts window should popup listing your current accounts that are setup along with giving you further options to add new accounts as well as editing and removing existing accounts. We are going to be setting up a new account so click on the Add… button. Select E-mail Account as the account type and click on Next. Enter the name with which you would like the email messages to display and click Next. Enter the email address of your Gmail account that you are going to be retrieving mail from and click Next.
Leave the default Incoming e-mail server type at POP3. In the Incoming mail server field enter pop.gmail.com and enter smtp.gmail.com inside of the Outgoing e-mail server name field. Make sure you check Outgoing server requires authentication and click Next. The screen will ask you for your Gmail email address which will be yourname@gmail.com along with the password you use to sign in to your Gmail account. You can choose to have Windows Mail remember your password for you so you don’t have to enter it each time you go to login if you like. Click next and you should receive a confirmation message stating that you have entered all the information required along with a checkbox. Make sure you select the check box so that no email gets downloaded at this time, we have a few more things to configure before we can grab our email.
You will be taken back to the Internet Accounts screen and your newly created account should be listed. Select the account and then click on the Properties button located to the right. Click on the Advanced tab in the window and set the Outgoing mail (SMTP) field to 465 while also checking the box to make sure that it uses a secure connection. Make sure to also check the box under the Incoming mail (POP3) field which should set the value to 995 automatically when you check the box. After that, click on OK and we are all set!
Click the Close button on the Internet Accounts window and when you are ready click the Send/Receive button located on the blue bar in Windows Mail. Mail will begin to download your emails from your Gmail account. Once your email messages have been download all you have to do to send an email is click on Create Mail, enter your information and send it.