Thursday, 24 January 2013

Reasons You Ought to Make a Gmail Outlook Connection

By Bill Mann


If you are going to use Outlook, you need to have an email account connected to it. In a corporate environment, your copy of the program is probably connected to a Microsoft Exchange server. But if you are using Outlook at home, you're going to need to find an email account to use with it. Many substantial companies, like Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google offer free web-based email (webmail) accounts, as do literally hundreds of smaller companies.

While you potentially have hundreds of options for an account to use with Outlook, not all free accounts are appropriate for one reason or another. The leading choice for many individuals is to link Outlook to a complimentary Gmail account from Google. Once you have a Gmail account, it just takes a couple of minutes to connect it to Outlook.

Why do people choose Gmail? Ease of use and cost are are key reasons. With some free services, you can only use their web interface because they intentionally prevent programs like Outlook from connecting to their servers. And it goes the other way too. Some companies allow you to use their account with Outlook, but make you pay for the privilege.

These two factors rule out many of the possibilities. Among the services left in the running, Gmail is by far the best choice. And when you choose to use Gmail, you get clear additional benefits.

One of the biggest benefits is the IMAP connection you can use to tie the two together. With an IMAP connection, you can work with your email both in Outlook and in your web browser. The way IMAP works, it ensure that your email is synchronized and identical in both places.

Gmail provides you massive amounts of storage on Google's servers. With the ever-increasing amount of email we all get, and the ever-increasing size of files, this is very welcome.

Finally there is the convenience of it all. It takes only minutes to sign up for a Gmail account, if you don't already have one. And once you do have one, it takes only minutes to connect it to Outlook. That's because all newer versions of Outlook know how to make an IMAP connection to Gmail automatically. Outlook's Auto Account Setup wizard does all the work for you.

By now it should be clear why Gmail is a great choice if you need an email account to use with Outlook.




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