How To Set Up Gmail IMAP with Outlook Express and Thunderbird

I already talked about the new IMAP feature in Gmail that hopefully you have access to. If not, be patient, it will come. David Risley from PCMechanic has a great how-to video for setting up Gmail IMAP on both Outlook Express and Thunderbird.

The first step is to make sure you have the IMAP feature in your Gmail account and that it is enabled. If you are going to use Thunderbird, make sure to download and install it. Outlook Express should already be installed if you have Windows. I recommend using Thunderbird. In fact, even though I love Outlook (not Outlook Express), Thunderbird is much faster.

His video is very easy to understand. Follow the steps for either Outlook Express or Thunderbird and Gmail IMAP should work in either client.

Be sure that you are setting up an IMAP account and not POP. For the mail servers, they would be:

• Incoming: imap.gmail.com (port 993 with secure connection)
• Outgoing: smtp.gmail.com (port 465 with secure connection)

Something to keep in mind that David Risley did not mention in the video. Some clients will automatically set the Gmail POP server for you after you enter in your Gmail account. You do not want this. When adding a new account in any client, if you see an option to select Gmail, you want to avoid that unless you want to set up Gmail POP.

Also, if you use Gmail to receive e-mails from other POP accounts, make sure you add the outgoing servers to your client otherwise you may find yourself replying with the wrong account. Thunderbird will automatically select the correct account when replying.

Towards the end of the video, he talks about a few features that Thunderbird has. One useful feature to prevent confusion when going from Gmail to Thunderbird is that Thunderbird actually shows stars for starred e-mails. Outlook and Outlook Express display them as flags.

For me, Thunderbird may be my number one choice. I had tried it before, but didn’t like not having a calendar built in and not being able to export my mail. Now that I can use IMAP, I don’t need to worry about exporting if I ever decide to change e-mail clients. I was a huge fan of Outlook, but compared to Thunderbird, Outlook is really slow with this new IMAP feature.