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How to Setup an IMAP account in Outlook Express to
Connect to Your Arrowmail Mailbox
Why would you want to use Outlook Express?
If you have Microsoft Outlook installed on your PC you should use it,
with an Outlook Anywhere connection to Exchange,
as this synchronises calendar, contact and task data as well as email
folders and provides the best overall email experience. As an IMAP email
client, Outlook Express is better than Outlook,
which lacks auto-purge and keeps throwing up a timeout error, so Outlook
Express comes a very good second-best to Outlook if you are only
interested in synchronising your email folders and not all the other Personal Information
Manager (PIM) data.
Here's a comparison table between Outlook and
Outlook Express:-
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Outlook with
Outlook Anywhere |
Outlook Express with IMAP |
Cost: |
You buy it as part of Microsoft
Office |
Free - included with Windows |
Items Synchronised: |
Email, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks &
Notes |
Email Folders Only |
Security: |
Always Encrypted |
Option to use encrypted IMAP |
Firewall Friendly: |
Yes Uses TCP Port 443 |
Neutral Uses TCP Port 143 for
normal and 993 for encrypted IMAP.
Uses Port 25 for sending email. |
Bandwidth Usage: |
Medium |
Light |
CPU/Disk Usage: |
Medium to Heavy |
Light |
Supports FreeDocs: |
Yes |
Read-only |
By IMAP we really
mean IMAP4, the latest Internet Message Access Protocol standard, and our servers also support IMAPS
or Secure IMAP where data is encrypted, back and forth, between the server and the client.
Why would you want to use an IMAP account?
1 - |
You haven't purchased Outlook which,
unlike Outlook Express, isn't free |
2 - |
You're primarily interested in email
and not the "personal organiser" features of Outlook |
3 - |
You have a different email client to
Outlook and you'd prefer to keep using it |
4 - |
Perhaps you own a Mac or a Linux PC and
don't want to use Microsoft software |
I use Outlook for personal email and Outlook Express with IMAP for
performing maintenance tasks on our mail servers because you can have lots of
accounts setup, view raw email messages and Outlook Express operates
faster than Outlook.
Accessing your mailbox using Outlook Anywhere on one PC and
Outlook Express, using IMAP, on another PC works fine as each program will show exactly the same mail
folders and emails. You can even open FreeDocs in Outlook Express but
can't add new FreeDoc files or save changes to any FreeDocs you've
edited.
Step-by-Step Instructions to Setup an IMAP account
in Outlook Express
From Outlook Express click on Tools - Accounts… - Add - Mail
Then enter your name in the box:-
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Even if
you usually use Outlook on your laptop, it's a good idea to also
have your
email account setup in Outlook Express for the times when you can only
get a slow Internet connection. |
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It's not Microsoft being clever, it always says:- For Example: John Smith |
Click Next >
Enter your email address:-
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Click Next >
Select IMAP as the type of incoming mail server.
Enter exchange.arrowmail.co.uk as both the IMAP and SMTP
server names:-
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Click Next >
Enter your Arrowmail username and password.
Tick Remember password unless you have security worries about the
PC you're using:-
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Click Next > then Finish
On the Internet Accounts screen select the account you've just
created and click Properties:-
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On the General tab change the account reference name to your
email address. This makes it easier to select this account if
you have multiple account setup in Outlook Express.
It's also a good idea to fill in the Organization and Reply
address lines:
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On the Servers tab put a tick in My server requires authentication.
If you click on Settings… you'll find that the default option is:-
Use same settings as my incoming mail server
This is what we want so don't change it, just click OK
Don't select the Log on using Secure Password Authentication,
there's an option to choose full encryption of both passwords and email
content later, on the Advanced tab.
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On the Connection tab make sure that the Always connect to this account using box is
unticked.
There's nothing to do on the Security tab.
On the Advanced tab there are 2 boxes labelled:-
This server requires a secure connection (SSL)
The first box determines if outgoing emails are
encrypted between your PC and our server and the second box determines
if incoming emails are encrypted.
The Arrowmail servers supports both standard and encrypted connections in both directions.
Encryption uses slightly more bandwidth and may be blocked by your
local firewall but if it works we recommend that you use it.
You'll notice that Standard IMAP uses TCP Port 143 while Encrypted
IMAP uses port 993 to receive emails.
Standard and Encrypted SMTP both use TCP Port 25 to send emails:-
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There's nothing to do on the IMAP tab as the default settings are fine.
Click OK to return to the Internet Accounts window and then Close.
You should immediately be asked this question:-
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Click Yes
When the list of folders in your mailbox has been downloaded, you can select the ones you want
to be visible.
The 4 folders shown below, with a symbol next to the folder name, are the ones that are visible by default.
Select a folder and use the Show and Hide buttons to change its visibility.
Some folders cannot be hidden.
Select the Visible tab to show just the visible folders:-
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Click OK
The visible folders from the IMAP account are now shown in Outlook Express's main window.
Even though just one account is setup in Outlook Express, a set of Local Folders is always
shown - click on the minus next to Local Folders to collapse
them.
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If you ever want to change which folders are visible, or see new
folders that you created using Outlook, right-click on the IMAP
account name and choose IMAP Folders… to return to the Show/Hide IMAP Folders screen.
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You can right-click on each folder and choose which of the 4 different synchronization levels
will apply to that folder.
We recommend the All Messages setting for most folders so you can
continue to access the full contents of emails when you don't have an
Internet connection.
For folders such as Deleted Items and Junk E-mail, we
recommend Headers Only.
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Deleting Emails
To people new to IMAP, the way that emails are deleted can appear
very strange.
With IMAP, deleting emails is a 2 step process:-
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First |
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You "mark an email for deletion" by clicking "Delete" in Outlook
Express, after which it's displayed with a strike-through line:-
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At this stage you
can, if you wish, right-click on the email and select "undelete" to
restore it.
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Second |
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You select Edit - Purge Deleted Messages from Outlook
Express which causes the email to be deleted from the server and to disappear from
your the mail folder in Outlook Express.
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This 2-step process makes a sort-of sense as a way to let you to work
off-line, but it's annoying.
The Mozilla Thunderbird email client combines the 2 processes into a
simple Delete.
In Outlook Express, if you go to Tools - Options - Maintenance and select
Purge deleted messages when leaving IMAP folders then the second Purge
operation works automatically:-
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With IMAP, there's no Deleted Items folder to give you a 2nd
chance to recover emails you've deleted. The 2 stage deletion process
stops an accidental mouse-click deleting an email but, once emails have
been "purged" from your Inbox they're gone for good.
Tips for Working with IMAP
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Setting Which Folders are Visible
Unlike Outlook, an IMAP account
doesn't automatically show all the folders in your mailbox and you
can "hide" folders you don't want to see - this is a good thing.
If you create a new folder using Outlook or OWA it does not
automatically show up in your IMAP account until you've refreshed the folder list
and set it to visible. Similarly, a deleted folder still shows up in
an IMAP folder tree until you refresh the folder list - you'll get an error message if you
try to open a deleted folder.
Right-click on the IMAP account name
and choose IMAP Folders then Reset List to see an updated list of
all the folders in your mailbox and you can then choose which ones
you want to be visible in Outlook Express's main screen.
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Setting the Synchronization Level for each folder
Our recommendation is to set the Synchronization Level for all folders
to All Messages except for Junk E-Mail, Deleted Items and
busy Public Folders.
The reasoning is that if you don't download the full email
message, then the body of an email will appear blank if you open it
when you don't have a connection to the Internet and so to allow you to continue working with no Internet connection, you need the
full email cached locally.
Downloading full items that you're never likely to read, slows
down send and receive operations and uses more local hard
drive space for the off-line cache.
Right-click on each folder and choose Synchronization Settings to
set the
synchronization level for that folder. |
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Is IMAP Insecure?
IMAP is one of those protocols that was invented when the Internet
was still a friendly place with no requirement for encryption or other
security measures. Standard IMAP therefore sends your logon password
and the contents of emails over the Internet without encryption.
It's still unlikely that anyone would be able to intercept and read this
traffic between your PC and our servers.
Secure IMAP has now been devised which strongly encrypts all email traffic between your PC
and our servers. The Arrowmail servers fully support Standard and Secure
IMAP and so does Outlook Express and most other email programs.
We therefore recommend that you use Secure IMAP. It's possible that the firewall
you're operating behind permits standard IMAP to pass but not Secure
IMAP so you'll have to decide whether you want to lower your security.
With an IMAP account, the IMAP protocol is only used to receive
emails and when you send an email from an IMAP account, you actually use
the SMTP protocol. Just like IMAP, standard SMTP is not encrypted but
you can select to use Secure SMTP instead which Arrowmail and Outlook
Express fully support.
As part of the Step-by-Step Instructions
for setting up an IMAP account in Outlook Express, above, we show how to
select Secure IMAP and SMTP.
If you use Secure IMAP and SMTP
between your PC and our servers, this does not guarantee
that your email will remain encrypted, end-to-end, from your Inbox right
through to the
recipient's Inbox. When our servers send your emails to the
recipient's server, we request an encrypted channel but our logs show us
that, in the majority of cases, this is declined. When an email has
left our servers we have no control over whether it will be encrypted or not.
The only way to ensure end-to-end encryption for your
emails is to pre-arrange this with all your correspondents and use
Outlook Express's digital certificate feature or use a 3rd party program
such as PGP.
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support@arrowmail.co.uk
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