How To Use Outlook Mail’s IMAP Support

About a year ago, Microsoft revamped and redesigned their Live email services and renamed and released the new version with the name Outlook.com. With this new name, they also redesigned the entire structure and look of the Microsoft mail, and optimized it to perform better in the Windows 8 operating system. 

IMAP is an application layer protocol that allows users to access the emails in the remote server of the email provider from the local machine. It is expanded as Internet Message Access Protocol and supports both online and offline modes of operation. The main advantage of the IMAP service is that if you change an email from read to unread on the email client in your home computer, then the email in the server also automatically changes accordingly. The feature that is handy in multiple-devices is not available with other protocols. 

Outlook.com depends on the Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync technology for accomplishing the real-time hole but some email manager programs are not able to deal with this technology and here we make use of the IMAP protocol for filling the void. Below we discuss the Outlook setting that you need to use for the IMAP protocol with Outlook email provider.

For incoming emails, set the incoming email server address to imap-mail.outlook.com, the server port to 993 and set the encryption type as SSL. Set the outgoing SMTP settings also likely with server set to smtp-mail.outlook.com, set the port number for server as 587 and the encryption as TLS. 

Microsoft also announced the support for the OAuth authentication protocol to the Outlook email service along with the IMAP protocol for opening the doors for third party software to communicate with Outlook.com in an advanced way. With the inclusion of OAuth in Outlook, most of the third party services like TripIt can automatically detect the travel details from the emails and add them to the itinerary automatically. Now you can use the Unroll.me and OtherInbox software tools to make your Outlook’s inbox clean and tidy. 

Microsoft included these latest features to the Outlook web mail to get back the webmail crown from its archrival Google. We can certainly hope that with the inclusion of the IMAP and OAuth technologies to the webmail, Microsoft will achieve its dream. If you need to know about the advanced features of the Outlook webmail, then go to the Outlook setting website where you can find all the required details.