The Outlook.com website is a great portal which allows you to treat your e-mails, organise your contacts and manage your agenda. Currently for my case, I use it currently for my personal e-mail and I have been working many hours within this email web interface.

However, next to the outlook.com website, you may also want to configure outlook.com on smartphone, or any desktop mail client (such as Thunderbird, Mac Mail or Microsoft Office Outlook). In this second case, you must sometimes manually define the IMAP and SMTP server for incoming and outcoming emails. Next to the server name, it is typically also required to define the port number which is used to relay the messages to and from the Microsoft mailserver. And lastly, given that security and privacy is becoming more important in digital times like these, you must explicitly mention the type of encryption that is used to encrypt your messages.

Step 1: Enable IMAP access for your Microsoft account

In order to use the (manual) IMAP settings on your mail client, you must first enable IMAP for your profile or account in the settings of Microsoft Outlook. This can be most easily done via logging into outlook.com and changing the settings right there:

• Login into Outlook.com
• Click on the gear icon to open the quick settings pane
• Then click on View All Outlook Settings
• Click on Email, Sync Email, and ensure IMAP access is turned on

Outlook.com IMAP settings

Use the following IMAP email configuration settings and put them into the account settings for your Microsoft Outlook account:

IMAP setting

Server name: outlook.office365.com
Port: 993
Encryption method: TLS

SMTP setting

Server name: smtp.office365.com
Port: 589
Encryption method: STARTTLS