Learn About Connecting Outlook 2007 to a Free Email Account
To use Outlook as an email program, you need to configure it to work with one or more email accounts. The best type of account for that is a free Google Gmail account. In case you're wondering, Gmail is a Web-based email account available through Google. If you have a Gmail account (or get one, which only takes a few minutes), you can use it to connect Gmail and Outlook. Once you have that connection set up properly, people can send email to your Gmail account, and you can read it in Outlook. Going the other way, you can use Outlook to reply to your Gmail messages, or compose new messages that get sent using the Gmail account.
Why should you choose Gmail? There are certainly lots of other free email accounts out there, like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. But connecting them to Outlook for free is the rub. Some Web-based email accounts are set up so you can view them using your Web browser, but they're set up to prevent you from connecting to them with programs like Outlook. Others (Yahoo! Mail & Hotmail, for example) allow you to connect to them with Outlook, but they charge you a fee for the privilege. Their free versions won't help you at all. There aren't that many Web-based email accounts that provide free connections to Outlook. Google's Gmail is the biggest and best-known of this select group.
With Gmail, you get a massive amount of space (measured in Gb) of mail storage right on Google's servers. It also provides powerful search capabilities when you search your mail through the web interface (basically doing a Google search on your own email). Google supports the Gmail service with advertising, but you only see the ads when you view your Gmail account using your Web browser, not when you use Outlook. This is definitely the free email service of choice for connecting to Outlook.
The directions for making the Gmail Outlook connection are moderately difficult, but in my experience, most people can make the connection on their own especially if they have access to someone more experienced should they get stuck. If you want to try setting up a Gmail account & connecting it to Outlook 2007, the instructions are posted here.
Configuring Outlook and Gmail to work together is just one of the things covered in the first lesson of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. If strengthening your skills with Microsoft Outlook 2007 makes sense to you in these uncertain economic times, I suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more.
