With Microsoft Outlook Express, you can optionally use IMAP connections for reading incoming mail. Using IMAP (instead of the more widely used "POP3") allows you to keep your messages on our servers instead of downloading them to your computer.
Keeping your messages on our servers can be useful if you read mail two completely different ways. For example, if you use both Outlook Express and Webmail, each program will know what messages you've read, and the two programs will share a single "sent mail" folder on the server. (If you always read mail using a single copy of Outlook Express, using IMAP won't make a difference and probably isn't worth the effort.)
To configure IMAP with SSL, you will:
You'll first need to follow the basic instructions to set up Outlook Express, with one change: choose "My incoming mail server is a IMAP server" (instead of "POP3") in step 6.
If you previously set up a POP3 account in Outlook Express, you'll unfortunately need to delete those settings from within Outlook Express, then go through the setup instructions again. Deleting the old settings from Outlook Express is safe: it will not delete mail from your In Box.
Click Tools, then Accounts from the menu bar.
Highlight the e-mail account you wish to change and click Properties.
Click the Advanced tab, then:
Click the IMAP tab, then:
To make Outlook Express save drafts and copies of sent messages on the IMAP server, set the following options. (If you don't, drafts and sent messages will be stored on your local hard disk, and won't be visible from Webmail or other programs.)
The words INBOX, Sent, and Drafts are case-sensitive. Be sure that "INBOX" is entirely uppercase, and that "Sent" and "Drafts" starts with a capital letter followed by lowercase letters.
Click OK to close the Properties window, then click Close to close the Internet Accounts window.
You're finished! Try sending yourself a test e-mail message to make sure it works.