I just helped my friend Mitch solve yet another problem. He had set up Outlook 2007 to work with his Google Mail account, but he couldn’t send messages. He received this error when he attempted to send a test message from his outbox: “Authentication failed. None of the authentication methods supported by this client are supported by your server.” We needed to fix this quickly.

I must admit, it never occured to me that you can use Microsoft Outlook for mail accounts such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo. Now that I know, I wanted to find out how to set this up correctly. I found instructions easily.

This is what you have to do in Outlook 2007:

1. First, open your Web browser and go to your Gmail account. Enable IMAP in Gmail settings and Save Changes.

2. In Outlook, go to Tools, then Email Accounts – you will see a pop up wizard. If you are using Outlook for the first time, you will see the wizard as soon as you open Outlook.

3. Enter your full name, email address (including @gmail.com), and password.

4. Tick the ‘Manually configure server settings or additional server types’ checkbox.

5. Click Next and in the new window, type in your name and email address if they are not already there.

6. Under Account Type, select IMAP and enter the incoming and outgoing server names:

• imap.gmail.com
• smtp.gmail.com

7. Add your user name (email address) and password.

8. Click on the More Settings button, then on the Advanced tab. Incoming server field should say 993, and select SSL encryption. Outgoing server field should say 587, and use TLS encryption.

9. In the Outgoing Server tab, select ‘My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication’. Also make sure that ‘Use same settings as my incoming mail server’ option is selected.

10. Click OK, then Next, then Finish and Close.

That’s it. You’re ready to test your email account.