This is a brief tutorial about how to configure a new email account with Microsoft Outlook 2011. You can find information about the appropriate settings to use for your email service provider HERE. This is not an installation guide for Microsoft Office 2011, we are assuming that you have already successfully installed and updated Microsoft Office 2011. If you are looking for help installing Office, you can take a look at our online installation guide or you can submit a ticket and one of our technicians will contact you.
Basic Settings
- Launch Outlook 2011 and select “Accounts” from the “Tools” menu.
- The “Accounts” dialog box will appear. Click the account type you would like to add. For the purposes of this demonstration, select the “E-mail Account” option. Contact your Exchange Server Administrator to learn how to setup Outlook 2011 for use with your Microsoft Exchange server.
- Outlook prompts you for some basic information about your account. Enter your Email Address (user@domain.com) and the password associated with the account. DO NOT click the “Add Account” button.
- Deselect the checkbox beside the phrase “Configure automatically”. The Advanced Account settings fields will appear. Enter the appropriate information into the various fields based on the preferences directed by your ISP or your email hosting provider.
- Click the “More options…” button beneath the “Outgoing server:” section to input any additional necessary outgoing mail server settings. This is specifically important for those outgoing mail servers that require authentication to function properly. You can first attempt to “Use incoming Server Info” however, in some scenarios, it is necessary to actually input your username and password information despite the fact that they are indeed the same as your incoming authentiation information. The “Unqualified domain” field is used when an email is addressed to an unqualified email address. An unqualified email address is missing a domain name. For example, the email address johns@anyservername.com is a fully qualified address. If you simply entered johns as the outgoing email address, that is an unqualified domain name. If you are working for a company, you can input your company’s domain (i.e. anyservername.com) name into this field and Outlook will automatically add the domain name to the end of the address. It is perfectly fine to leave it blank, as long as you remember to always use fully qualified domain names.
- After verifying you have entered all of the appropriate information, click the “Add Account” button.
- The Account Settings drawer will disappear and the “Accounts” dialog box with the newly created account will be visible as the “Default Account” on the left side of the window.
Advanced Settings
If you are an advanced user and know how to manipulate more advanced settings and feel comfortable doing so, feel free to click the “Advanced…” button on the bottom right corner of the “Accounts” dialog box. We will explain some of the highlights here, but this is not an exhaustive list of all of the options available. Feel free to contact us or submit a ticket if you need help with these or any other settings for your environment.
The “Advanced Settings” drawer contains two or three of the following tabs, “Server”, “Folders” and “Security.”
Server
Leave a copy of each message on server
NOTE: only available with POP3 accounts.
This setting allows multiple devices to connect to the same account and see all of the messages delivered to that account whether or not another device has already accessed them. It tells the server to maintain a copy of each message on the server and forces the client to maintain a record of those messages that have already been synchronized. Leaving this on may cause messages to become duplicated on one or many of the clients if the client loses the record of the messages that have already been synchronized. There are several options available to the user about when Outlook will actually remove the messages that have already been synchronized. The user can choose from these options in the pop-up menu titled “Delete copies from the server”. The optional selections are “Never”, “After One Day”, “After one Week”, “After One Month” and the default “After Deleting From This Computer”. These options should be fairly self explanatory but feel free to contact us if you should have questions regarding these settings.
Send multiple commands to server simultaneously
NOTE: only available with IMAP accounts.
This functionality allows Outlook (as the name implies) to send multiple commands at one time rather than having to send them one-after-the-other. This may speed up performance on servers that can handle it, however, according to Microsoft “Some e-mail servers can be overwhelmed by simultaneous commands. If you are receiving sync errors in your IMAP account, try clearing this check box.”- Always download complete message bodies
NOTE: only available with IMAP accounts.
This selection tells Outlook whether to download the complete contents of a message or if it should only download the message headers. If unselected, Outlook will only download the message headers and will complete the message acquisition when the user asks to view the message. Turning this off can be very helpful if you are working on a slower connection and have a lot of large messages you need to deal with. Or if you are moving large amounts of messages between folders. However, it does slow down the apparent overall performance of Outlook since it needs to acquire the message when you attempt to open it rather than it being locally cached when Outlook acquires it initially. The option to download the complete message bodies “In Inbox only” is a nice hybrid between having all of the messages being cached locally and having to wait for your messages to load when you want to read them sooner, rather than later. This will provide quick access to messages that are in your Inbox but Outlook will wait until you ask it to acquire the full message contents of messages in folders other than your Inbox. - Download headers only
NOTE: only available with POP3 accounts.
This option overrides the traditional functionality of a POP3 account type and instructs Outlook to download only the message headers rather than the entire contents of the message. This should only be enabled in specialized circumstances when a server admin instructs you to do so. - Use IMAP IDLE (if the server supports it)
NOTE: only available with IMAP accounts.
In its most basic terms, IMAP IDLE implies the ability for a mail server to maintain a live connection to the client thus allowing the server to notify the client when new messages arrive and providing a more responsive connection to the mail server. It means that, among other things, if supported, the user is immediately notified when messages arrive without needing to click a “refresh” or “send/receive” button. - Check for unread messages in subscribed folders
NOTE: only available with IMAP accounts.
This option tells Outlook to only check for unread messages in folders that have been identified to Outlook as “subscribed.” If a user is noting that the initial startup performance seems slow, and that the user has a large amount of folders or a large amount of messages within their folders, it may help to have Outlook only check for new messages in the Inbox. Deselecting this option will prevent Outlook from checking IMAP folders for unread messages. It will still acquire unread messages when that folder is selected in the folder list. - IMAP Root Folder
NOTE: only available with IMAP accounts.
Usually Outlook automatically fills in a value if it is needed by your mail server. You should leave this default value unless you are certain of the value that your server requires. It is related to the namespace that Outlook uses when looking for your IMAP folders. Sometimes, mail servers put your account folders into a subdirectory and it is necessary to input that directory name into this field so that Outlook can locate your folders.
Folders (IMAP Account Types Only)
Store (Sent/Draft/Junk) messages in this folder
These pop-up menus tell Outlook where you prefer messages it considers Sent, Draft and Junk to be stored. If you prefer these message types to be available on multiple devices (i.e. if you want all of your devices to share the same Sent, Drafts and Junk folders) this is where you need to set this up. Choose whatever folder on the server you use for each of these message types.- Move deleted messages to this folder:
Selecting this radio button will tell Outlook that instead of simply marking messages as deleted it will actually relocate the message from the current folder to a completely folder that you determine by utilizing the pop-up to the right of this option. Similar to the Sent/Draft/Junk, if you want your various devices to share the same “Deleted Messages” folder choose the desired folder in the pop-up menu as well as a schedule for when Outlook is to delete the messages in that folder by choosing a timeframe in the pop-up menu.
NOTE: if you need to delete a large amount of messages or a number of messages that are quite large using this option will dramatically slow you down. This is because if this option is selected every message that is deleted needs to be moved physically on the server. If you are simply trying to delete large amounts of messages, it may be better to use the “Mark messages as deleted option” so that the server doesn’t actually need to move the messages, it just needs to mark them as deleted. - Mark messages as deleted
As mentioned in our note above, this option, rather than forcing the server to actually move the message between folders, it simply tags the message as pending deletion. In Outlook 2011, it appears there is a bit of a bug with this functionality as in our testing environment, setting this option does not actually mark the message as deleted in the client or on the server, it simply deletes it without first moving it to a “Trash” or “Deleted Items” folder. It simply disappears immediately. In theory, when this setting functions correctly, the message will have a red “X” next to it and Outlook will give you the option to choose when these messages get deleted, either never by selecting “Do not automatically delete messages” or to delete them upon Outlook’s closing by selecting “Permanently erase deleted messages when Outlook closes.”
Security
Digital Signing
Digital signing is a method by which an assigned certificate is used to secure email communications. In order to utilize digital signing you must first install a digital certificate from a certificate authority like Comodo or Verisign. These range in price and each user needs its own certificate. Once the certificate is purchased and installed, it can be selected in the “Certificate” pop-up menu. Once you have a certificate selected, the other options will become available. The signing algorithm should correspond to the certificate selected and the signing authority can provide more information about this option. Contact us if you should have additional question about how to provide additional security for your email transactions.- Encryption
Encryption, like digital signing, requires an encryption certificate from a Certification Authority. These are different than digital signatures and provide another layer of security for your emails. Digital certificates, according to Verisign “are used to code an email so that it cannot be read or tampered with. Recipients of an encrypted email can verify the identity of the sender and know that the information contained in the message has not been intercepted or changed. Because the recipient can verify the identity of the sender, encryption also provides authentication. A digital signature is legally binding and cannot be repudiated or forged.”
