First load Microsoft Outlook Express. Find it from your Windows Start bar.

Once it has loaded, click on Tools then select Accounts

Now select Add and then Mail.

Enter your name. This is what will appear in the "From" section of any email you send.

To make your emails look professional it is advisable to use Capital letters as the example shows John Smith instead of john smith

What you type here will be what everyone you send an email to will see.

Then click on Next.

Enter your full email address here.

Then click on Next.

These settings are for connecting to the mail server at your domain.

enter mail. then your domain name.

for example the domain name for our website is www.bouttimesoftware.com.au so here I would enter

mail.bouttimesoftware.com.au

Note the domain name is entered without the WWW at the start. basically WWW is replaced with mail.

Make sure you don't forget the fullstop after mail, example mail.bouttimesoftware.com.au

Use the same data for Incoming and Outgoing servers.

Then click on Next.

Account Name is your complete email address.

Password is the password configured for your email account.

Then click on Next.

Click on Finish and you're done.

Now from the Accounts page click on Close.

Now verify that it is working by clicking on Send/Receive mail.

If that test went through without errors, then try sending yourself an email to make sure you can send. To do this create another email and just enter your own email address in the TO section.

If that test goes through successfully then congratulations your account is configured and working. You have completed this tutorial.

You will only have to continue reading if you were unable to send an email.

Problem sending email?

Only go through these steps if Outlook reported an error when trying to send an email.

Some Internet Service Providers (ISP) will prevent you from sending out email using Port 25.

This is an anti-spam protection scheme, so if you can not send email the first thing to try is changing the default port from 25 to 26

To do this Go back into the Accounts section again, (shown in STEP 1).

Then select the account in question from the list on the left and select Properties

Click on the Advanced tab.

In Outgoing Mail (SMTP) there is a box showing the port number 25 Change this value to 26

Now click on Apply then Ok, and finally Close to exit the accounts page, and now try sending an email again.

If TRY 1 didn't work, then you can try using SSL in order to send mail. Change the port to 587 then click on the checkbox This Server requires a secure connection (SSL). *note* you may get a prompt each time you send a message about using the certificate accept this, Move mouse over image to see an example

If neither of the above two worked, then the only solution is to change the Outgoing mail server setting. To do this have a look at the next section in this Tutorial ( Adjust Account Configuration ). In the Server section you will need to configure the outbound mail server to use the settings from your Internet Service Provider. For example if you are with telstra then you could use mail.bigpond.com. Check the configuration settings from your internet service providers website, or phone their technical support department.

Once Outlook has loaded, click on Create Mail.

This will open up a new window.

You are now presented with all the options required to send an email. In this sample picture everything that is in RED is Required. Items that are in BLUE are not, but can be used if needed.

To ensure your email is received successfully make sure you enter the recpients email address in the TO field and make sure you enter a subject. Some Mail servers can reject emails that do not included a subject or they could get classified as spam and not delivered.

CC and BCC. These are used if you wish to send the one email to numerous people. CC is Carbon Copy and BCC is Blind Carbon Copy. Both work the same, except BCC ensures that no-one else knows who you sent the email to. CC on the other hand lists everyones address in the email. To help combat spam it is strongly suggested to use BCC.

If you have numerous email accounts configured, then you would need to select which account appears in the FROM field of this email.

To do that click on the down facing arrow as highlighted by the red box. This will present you will a pulldown list of all accounts currently configured.

Simply select the account you require by clicking on it and now the From field will change to this account.

This is really easy to do. Simply create your email as per normal and then click on the paperclip Attach Icon as highlighted by the red box.

You will now be presented with a browse folder from Microsoft Windows. Simply look through the folders for the file you require and select it.

See next image sample. You can see now there is an attach line displayed under the Subject. This will list all the files you have selected. You can select more than one file.

*CAUTION* Notes about sending attachments.

Make sure the files are not too large. To be safe do not send anything larger than 5MB (5 MegaBytes) without contacting the recipient first. Anything you send that is too large will get rejected and your email will not be received.

Make sure the file type you are sending can be read by the recipient. For example if you are using the latest version of Microsoft Office and you send a .DOCX file. Does the recipient have that same version of Office? It is advisable to check first, or send a more compatible format such as .DOC

Microsoft Email programs like Outlook have an annoying "Feature" where they interpret your attachment and then imbed it in the email. This can cause problems for the recipient if they are not using Outlook. So to prevent this from happening it is always advisable to send a compressed version of the file (such as ZIP or PDF).

Certain file types can be deemed harmful to the recipients computer (such as .bat, .exe, .com, .dll) and as such they can be deleted, or worst case not even delivered. So to prevent this from happening it is advisable to send all files in a compressed format like ZIP. The only items not requiring this are images ( such as jpg, gif, png). Compression has two other benefits.

BENEFIT 1 Compressing files usually makes them smaller, making them quicker to email and to download.

BENEFIT 2 Compressed files need to be uncompressed by the recipient. If the file was damaged in transit then the recipient will be alerted to this when they goto open the compressed file. If a file was not compressed (such as a word document) but got damaged it may still open however the recipient would not know it was damaged and could be looking at a document containing incorrect data!

How to Compress a file It's easy. Microsoft Windows can do that, Go into my computer, look through the folders until you find the file in question, Right Mouse Button Click on the file, select Send To then Compressed (zipped) Folder and bingo in the same folder now will be a file with the same filename, but .ZIP extension. Then use that as your attachment instead of the original file.

Once you have finished creating your email, simply click on Send and you're done.

If there are any errors sending your email Outlook will display a notification box informing you of what went wrong.