Microsoft is quietly migrating all their basic applications to Windows live. Windows Mail users, who might be experiencing a slow mail client experience, can now upgrade for free to Windows Live Mail. Windows 7 will not support Windows mail, so if you plan to upgrade to Windows 7, then it’s a good idea to upgrade from Windows Mail to Windows Live Mail now. We’ll walk you through the upgrade process.

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Gmail, provided by Google, is probably one of the best free email services in the world, not just because it’s free, or because it provides over 6.3 GB of email account space and growing, but because Gmail allows FREE access through the use of remote protocols like POP and IMAP. This means you can use an email client you already use to download and view all your mail accounts at once. Today we’ll walk through setting up Windows Mail on Windows Vista. These instructions could also be used for setting up Outlook Express on Windows XP, Windows 2000, or even Windows 2003.

Note: Before you can use POP or IMAP with Gmail, you must first configure your Gmail account to allow POP and IMAP. Click here for instructions.

Start Windows Mail, then click Tools –> Accounts.

Now click Add.

Click E-mail Account.

POP SETUP

The setup wizard will walk you through setting up both POP (POP3), and IMAP. First we’ll setup POP, then later in the article IMAP. There are differences. POP downloads a copy of the email to your computer. IMAP allows you to view email on the server without downloading it. Use your Gmail address, and enter pop.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com as shown below. Check the box for Outgoing server requires authentication. Google uses authentication to prevent open SMTP relay spam. Choose POP3 for Incoming mail.

Once the wizard finishes you’ll see the General tab. You can change the label of your account to whatever you like. I used Gmail account POP. Don’t forget to fill in the Reply address, so recipients of you emails can hit reply and have your email already filled in.

Your Servers tab settings should look like the one below.

Under the Advanced tab make sure you change the port setting for SMTP to 465, and POP3 to 995. Gmail uses non-standard ports to avoid spam, and other abuse problems.

The POP, or POP3, protocol has a special feature. Rather than just downloading email to your machine then deleting it off the server, you can set it to leave a copy of the mail on the server for a specified number of days. This way you can collect email at work, and at home without losing any email.

Below is an example of an email collected from Gmail in Windows Mail using using the POP protocol.

Click Here for Page 2.