subject: Gmail with Outlook - Making the Gmail Outlook Connection [print this page] Gmail with Outlook - Making the Gmail Outlook Connection
Would you like to connect Outlook to a Web-based email account? If so, there are lots of options. Many huge companies, like Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google offer free web-based email accounts, as do hundreds of smaller companies.
But not all free accounts will work well with Outlook. That's why the top choice for most people is to connect Google's Gmail with Outlook. Once you have a Gmail account, it only takes a few minutes to configure the Gmail Outlook connection.
This allows you to use Outlook to read messages sent to your Gmail account. It also allows you to send messages from Outlook that use your Gmail address.
Why use Gmail? Well, there are lots of other popular free email services out there, like Yahoo! Mail & 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 don't allow you to connect to them with programs like Outlook.
Yahoo allows you to connect to Outlook, but they in effect charge you a fee for the privilege. With those services, the free versions of the email account need to be upgraded to a paying version to enable the connection.
Among the vast number of free email services out there, only a small number let you connect Outlook for free. Google's Gmail is the biggest and best-known of this elite group.
With Gmail, you get a massive amount of space (measured in Gb) of mail storage right on Google's servers. Gmail 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 use your Gmail account with your web browser, not when you use Gmail with Outlook. If you haven't yet chosen an email service, or if you are already a Gmail user, making the Gmail Outlook connection is the obvious way to go.
The directions for making the Gmail Outlook connection are relatively long, but in my experience, virtually anyone can make the connection with the help of some quality instructions.
