Outlook Express, the world’s most famous email program, uses two popular email protocols for download emails from online accounts – POP and IMAP. Thus, Outlook Express compatible email accounts are those that support at least one of these protocols.
There are many different types of email accounts and, as you can understand, it’s not possible to cover each and everyone one of them in this listing. However, you can find all the popular Outlook Express compatible email accounts below. Remember, to setup and configure a new email account in the email program, you need to first find out if its POP or IMAP enabled and the settings for that protocol.
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FYI, POP(or POP3) stands for Post Office Protocol version 3 while IMAP (or IMAP4) is the short form for Internet Message Access Protocol. SMTP (another term that you shall hear often) is Simple Mail transfer Protocol and is responsible for sending emails and works in conjunction with POP to download email to your computer.
Popular email accounts compatible with Outlook Express
- ISP email accounts: Any ISP worth its salt would provide a free email account with the internet connection. Such accounts come with a free POP access – if not, you should considering switching to another provider. These accounts are definitely compatible with Outlook Express!
- Gmail email accounts: All free Gmail email accounts can be setup in Outlook Express as they are POP and IMAP enabled.
- Hotmail accounts: Hotmail POP settings have only recently been announced. At the time of writing, they are still available only to a subset of subscribers as this feature is being rolled out gradually. You can either wait for your Hotmail account to be POP enabled and, thus, Outlook Express compatible, or else pay a small yearly free and get the Hotmail Plus service. The story of Hotmail on Outlook Express is many years old and has gone through many ups and downs. Usually old Hotmail email accounts are compatible with Outlook Express but the new ones were not. The cause of this is attributed to the changes in email access protocols used over time by the Hotmail service. You can now use the free POP3 Hotmail access to set up the account in Outlook Express.
- Yahoo! email accounts: Unfortunately, free Yahoo! email accounts are not POP enabled. You can, however, pay about $20 for yearly POP access and download al your emails through Outlook Express. FYI, to download Yahoo email for free (without a spending a single penny), use the Yahoo email program – Zimbra desktop.
- Web site email accounts: If your web site is on a reliable web hosting company such as Hostgator or Lunarpages, any email account you create on your web site will be POP enabled and Outlook Express compatible.
As I mentioned above, Outlook Express compatible email accounts are those that can speak the same language as the email program, namely POP and or IMAP.
