Connecting your email client to your Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail accounts

How to configure an email client to connect your email accounts in Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail

In this article we'll show you how to configure an email client to connect to your email accounts in Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, the most popular and widely used web-based email services. This is helpful if you want to manage all your email accounts with one email client.

The set up process is practically the same as when you configure an email client to connect to an email account that you have created from the Email section of the HostKnox control panel. So you can refer to the tutorial about the particular email client that you want to configure for more details about the whole set up process. The only things that you need to change are the names of the incoming and outgoing mail servers, and of course the email address and its password.

To set up the email client to manage your account in Yahoo use the following for incoming and outgoing servers:

For an incoming server use one of the two options depending on whether you want to retrieve your email messages using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) or POP (Post Office Protocol).

With IMAP you can read and manage your messages directly on the server. This way you can manage your account from different locations.

With POP your inbox messages are downloaded on your local computer. Most email clients will delete the copy of the message on the server, but some are configured by default to download a copy on your local computer and keep another one on the server, at least for a certain period (e.g. 14 days).

You can configure the email client to delete or to keep the copies of the messages in the inbox folder on the server, and you can also configure it to keep the copies on the server just for a certain period or not to delete them at all. These options can be changed from the settings for the specific account, from the same place where the port numbers for incoming and outgoing servers are configured, or from the same place where the settings for the incoming server are located.

Depending on the protocol you want to use you also have to select the corresponding protocol for an incoming server type (IMAP or POP) from the options of the email client.

The server names for Gmail are:

These will work fine. You can also use imap.googlemail.com and smtp.googlemail.com.

The server names for Hotmail are:

Unfortunately, with Hotmail you can't set your email client to use an IMAP incoming server, which in this case is probably a disadvantage since the purpose behind web-based email is to be able manage it from different locations. However, in case the email client you use is set to delete from the server messages that are already downloaded on your local computer, Hotmail will keep copies of the messages in a folder called POP (subfolder of Deleted) in your web-based email account.

As we mentioned above most email clients in fact will not delete your messages from the server, so they'll be left in the inbox folder of your web-based account. And, of course, you can always change the settings of the email client. Another option is to use the email client Windows Live Mail. In this case it will automatically detect your account when you type your email address and it will use HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) to manage it. HTTP is not an email protocol but it can be used to check your mail.

Another thing you have to remember when configuring an email client to use your Hotmail account is to set the port number for the outgoing (SMTP) server to 587, regardless of whether you enable encryption or you don't. If you enable encryption, it will also work fine on port 587 (thanks to STARTTLS), despite the fact that the encryption port is 465. In the rare cases when you can choose between SSL and TLS for encryption (e.g. Outlook 2007, 2010), select TLS and set the port number to 587. With email clients (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird, SeaMonkey) in which you can choose between SSL/TLS on the one hand and STARTTLS on the other, select STARTTLS on port number 587.

There are some email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Zimbra Desktop (Yahoo, Gmail) that will automatically configure the server names and port numbers once you enter the email address of your Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail account. As mentioned above, however, you might need to change some settings for the outgoing (SMTP) server when it comes to connecting to a Hotmail account.