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If you are going to use Outlook 2007 as an email program, and you’re not connected to a corporate Microsoft Exchange server, you’ll need to connect Outlook to a Web-based email account. Lots of big companies, like Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google offer free web-based email accounts, as do hundreds of smaller companies. But not all of them are suitable for use with Outlook. The best choice for most people is to connect Outlook to a free Gmail account from Google. Once you have a Gmail account, it only takes a few minutes to configure the Gmail Outlook connection. This allows you to use Outlook to read messages sent to your Gmail account. It also allows you to send messages from Outlook using your Gmail account.

Why should you choose Gmail? Well, there are lots of other free email accounts out there, for example Yahoo! Mail & Hotmail. But connecting them to Outlook for free is the rub. Some Web-based email accounts are set up so you can view them using your Web browser, but they don’t allow you to connect to them with programs like Outlook. Others (Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, for example) allow you to connect them to Outlook, but they charge you a fee for the privilege. With those services, the free versions of the email account need to be upgraded to a paying version to enable the connection. There’s only a small number of Web-based email accounts that allow you to connect Outlook for free. Google’s Gmail is the biggest and best of this elite group.

With Gmail, you get a massive amount of space (measured in Gb) of mail storage right on Google’s servers. It also provides powerful search capabilities (basically doing a Google search on your own email). Google supports the Gmail service with advertising, but you only see the ads when you view your Gmail account using your Web browser, not when you use Outlook. Gmail is clearly the free email service of choice for connecting to Outlook.

The steps required to make the Gmail Outlook connection are moderately difficult, but in my experience, most people can make the connection on their own or with a little help. The instructions are posted here if you want to try it yourself.

Configuring Outlook and Gmail to work together is just one of the things covered in Lesson 1 of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. If strengthening your Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 skills in this time of uncertain job prospects makes sense to you, I suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more.