Setting Up an Outlook 2007 E-Mail Account from Home

After you sign up with an ISP (Internet Service Provider), you can set up Outlook 2007 to send and receive e-mail from your e-mail account at home. Although any individual Internet e-mail account requires setup only once, you can set up as many accounts as you need.

If you're a corporate user, your system administrators may not want you to mess around with account settings at all — or may have special arrangements and settings they want you to use when you work from home. Either way, it's best to ask first.

If you're on your own, you should probably call the tech support line from your online service or ISP to get all the proper spellings of the server names and passwords. (Don't forget to ask whether they're case-sensitive!)


To set up an Internet e-mail account through Outlook 2007, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools --> Account Settings.

The Account Settings dialog box appears.

2. Click the E-mail tab.

The Email Accounts setup page appears.

3. Click New.

The Add New Email Account dialog box appears.

4. Fill in the blanks in the New Email Account dialog box.

Be careful to enter the information accurately — especially your e-mail address and password. Otherwise, your e-mail won't work.

5. Click Next.

A configuration screen appears, and Outlook begins trying to automatically configure your e-mail account. You get one of these two responses:

• If it succeeds, the Congratulations screen appears and you can click Finish to complete the process.

• If Outlook is unable to automatically configure your e-mail account, continue these steps.

6. Click the check box labeled Manually Configure Server Settings.

The Server Type dialog box appears.

7. Click the radio button for the server type that your e-mail provider requires.

Most home users choose E-mail.

8. Click Next.

A new configuration screen appears.

9. Type the settings that your e-mail provider requires.

Again, each e-mail service differs, but most of them can tell you how to make their e-mail work with Outlook.

10. Click the Test Account Settings button.

The Test Account Settings dialog box shows you what's happening while Outlook tests the entered settings to see if you got everything right.

If you type one wrong letter in one of your e-mail settings, your messages won't go through. The computers that Outlook has to send messages through (called servers) are terribly literal, so it's good to find out whether your setup works while you're still tweaking your settings. If the test fails, try retyping some entries (and then clicking the Test Account Settings button) until you get a successful test. When the test is successful, the Test Account Settings dialog box says "Congratulations! All tests completed successfully. Click Close to continue." So that's what you should do.


11. Click Close.

The Test Account Settings dialog box closes.

12. Click Next (or press Enter).

The Congratulations screen appears. Take a moment to feel the thrill of success.

13. Click Finish.

You can set up more than one Internet e-mail account, so each member of the family can have a separate address. You also may want to have different accounts for business use and personal use. Perhaps you just want to set up separate accounts so you can send yourself messages. Whatever you like to do, the process is pretty much the same.