Need Outlook Express email account?
Posted on September 16, 2009 under Email, Outlook Express | Leave a comment
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I need an Outlook Express email account. I had one before my computer crashed and now I cannot get it back. Also is there way I can check the old email messages? Can you please help me out?
Sharon asks some basic but common questions regarding email and Outlook Express. I will first clear some misconceptions and then offer possible solutions to her Outlook Express woes!
Outlook Express doesn’t give you an email account
Outlook Express is an email client. In layman’s terms, it’s a program that lets you download, send and manage email messages and accounts.
Important: Outlook Express does not provide an email address hence the notion of “needing an Outlook Express email account” is incorrect. Thus, before you can start using the program you should have an email account. Was this confusing? OK, here we go again; In order to use Outlook Express this is what you need to do:
- Get an email address: It doesn’t take the brains of a rocket scientist to create an email account. There are hundreds of companies offering free email services most notable of these are Gmail from Google, Hotmail (now known as Windows Live Hotmail) from Microsoft and Yahoo! Mail.
Important: If you use an internet connection from an ISP at home or office, they would have provided you with a free email account – contact them for details. Email accounts provided by ISPs are generally compatible with Outlook Express (read more below). - Make email account compatible with Outlook Express: Before you can use an email account in Outlook Express you need to confirm whether it will work with the email program. In technical terms, the email account should be POP3 or IMAP enabled. FYI, POP3 and IMAP are email protocols that are used by Outlook Express to connect to the machine (web server) that has your email account and download messages to your computer.
Not all free email accounts would be POP3 or IMAP enabled. For instance, to access your Hotmail or Yahoo email messages using the popular POP3 protocol you need to upgrade the free account to Plus! which costs about $20 annually. Get a free Gmail account if you want 100% free POP and IMAP accessibility. - Add and setup your email account in Outlook Express: To let Outlook Express download and store messages on your computer, you need to provide it with all the email account details which include login (username and password) and email server information. Please refer the link for step by step instructions along with screenshots.
Checking older email messages with Outlook Express
Now to answer Sharon’s second question – can she check email messages on a computer that crashed? Is there a way she can retrieve those emails?
Firstly, data on a hard disk can be recovered but you would need to take it to a specialist. Secondly, if Sharon had opted to preserve a copy of the email message on the server when using Outlook Express then she can download these onto any other computer.
In conclusion: You don’t need an Outlook Express email account – what you need is an email account AND Outlook Express and then setup the program to download the messages on your computer.
Finally, Outlook Express is outdated. Microsoft has stopped the development and support for this program. They have released Windows Live Mail which is free just like its predecessor.
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