This article provides information on setting up Outlook 2007 to access mail with a secure (SSL) connection. Setup for later versions of Outlook is similar.
First, go to the account settings screen:
1. Account Settings
If you are adding a new account, select the "New" button. If you are modifying an existing account, use the "change" button. You will see an email settings form like this:
2. Change E-mail Account
Here you:
- Replace you@yourdomain.ca with your actual mail address.
- The incoming and outgoing servers will be provided in your setup message. mail.yourdomain.ca is just an example.
- For User Name, be sure you use a plus sign ("+") instead of an ampersand ("@"). Outlook 2007 treats an @ as an error. More recent versions do not have this issue.
- Do not check the Secure Password Authentication box. SPA is one of those proprietary Microsoft things nobody cares about.
Before testing the account, select "More settings". You will see a form with four tabs where some changes are needed.
3. Internet E-mail Settings - General
You can pick any values you want here.
4. Internet E-mail Settings - Outgoing Server
On the second tab, check the box "My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication" and select "Use the same settings as my incoming mail server". This helps prevent unauthorized and forged mail.
Ignore the third tab, "Connection".
5. Internet E-mail Settings - Advanced
On the last tab we tell Outlook to use a secure connection:
Settings that differ from the defaults are:
- The incoming port is 995
- Check the box "This server requires an encrypted connection (SSL)"
- The outgoing port is 465
- Select SSL or SSL/TLS from the list "Use the following type of encrypted connection"
- If you use multiple devices, check "Leave a copy of messages on the server" and make sure that you check the "Remove from server after" box. If you leave your messages on the server indefinitely you will consume disk space. If you don't use multiple devices, you can un-check the box but we still recommend leaving mail on the server for a few days. This allows us to examine spam that gets through so we can tune your filters to get rid of it.
Then click the "OK" button to return to the e-mail settings screen and click the "Test Connection" button.
If you continue to experience problems, our firewall security may have blocked you for too many failed access attempts. If you suspect this is the case, use what is my IP address to get your public IPv4 address so we can resolve the problem quickly.
