My wife and I are moving from Quebec to Ontario into an apartment building that has some sort of arrangement entailing a better deal with Bell as an internet provider.
According to the Bell rep that I have spoken to, Bell recently stopped their Sympatico email service and customers now have to use a third-party email provider such as Gmail. However, I’m not a big fan of Gmail’s user interface and would like to use Outlook.
How does this work, that is, could I somehow integrate my Gmail account into Outlook as a user interface or would I have to get some different email provider that uses Outlook?
GMail supports a fairly universal mailbox access protocol called IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol, just like it says on the tin). Enable that, and configure Outlook to access it, and Bob is your parent’s sibling.
Doing it this way leaves the emails on the GMail server, in case you have to access them over the (icky) web interface, but you get fairly complete management of email and folders within the Outlook application.
What are you currently using to read your Sympatico email? Do you go to the Sympatico website or are you already using Outlook? And when you say you want to use Outlook, do you mean the standalone Outlook program that runs on your computer? Or the Outlook website at outlook.live.com?
If you’re going to have to switch to a new email address, it may better for you to get an account at https://outlook.live.com. You’ll get an email address on that site and you won’t have to worry about integrating gmail into Outlook. And I’m sure you’ll be able to read your mail with the standalone Outlook mail program.
Our home email is currently with our internet service provider in Quebec, which comes with its own email. My preference for Outlook comes from my workplaces for the last 20 years, and I will be retiring soon so that will no longer be an option.
That’s good to know and I’ll definitely check it out. Thanks
If you’re interested in saving the emails you have on Sympatico, it looks like you could download them. Sympatico seems to support the standard IMAP/POP email protocols. Those protocols allow other email programs and servers to pull the emails off of Sympatico. The connection values are here:
You would need a standalone email program like that Windows Outlook program like you used at work. Configure it with the above settings and you should be able to access your Sympatico emails.
This is exactly what I do with my Gmail account. The IMAP option allows you to manage your email in Outlook, and whatever you do there is replicated on the server (i.e., if you delete an email in Outlook it’s gone; you can’t get it from the server). You may also be able to set it up as a POP interface, which just downloads copies of emails from the server, instead of two-way syncing.
I have MS Office with Outlook program (which is I assume what you have) not the web interface. You can connect it to your GMail (as mentioned above) as well as your new email.
When I changed internet email providers a few years ago I had a limited time to switch to a new email. I connected to the old and new email accounts at the same time, created a PST local file and then moved all my historic mail into PSTs.
Actually, I have one PST for each year and arranged by categories (subfolders) within - sent, received, etc. I currently use outlook.com for my main account, but you never know when Microsoft will pull something like Bell did. Bell allegedly decided to start deleting your saved cable PVR files after 60 days instead of 1 year. (I think they reversed themselves quickly?) I would not be surprised if some of the free email providers catch on to the same idea and decide to start policies “we only retain email for X years”.
The only downside to this is - don’t lose your copy of Outlook. PSTs aren’t necessarily compatible with other email programs. In fact, archiving emails is a royal pain.
I don’t think outlook is an email server. It is just a software to connect to an email server. It can connect to your company’s domain email server, or Yahoo’s or Google’s. So yes you can download outlook (I don’t think it’s free, if you have a personal Office 365 account, you can access it that way. You then connect your gmail account through Googles email server with outlook and viola!
So there’s an interesting thing here wrt those who have referenced Bell Sympatico. Our Bell point of contact told us that Sympatico no longer was supported, or something of that nature, and to just go with a third party provider like Gmail.
However, after seeing your references to Sympatico websites, I Googled Sympatico and there does indeed appear to be an extant Bell email. I’m going to check that out later and if it is Sympatico or Sympatico-like then I’ll pursue that. I actually find Gmail really clunky and counter-intuitive.
My recommendation is to never use the ISP’s provided email. You end tied into a provider regardless if they provide the best service, the best deal, or if you move and they are even available.
Get a Gmail or Outlook.com address and be done with it.
You can use the Outlook program from MS Office to connect to other services like GMail. As mentioned above, it’s a MAPI or even POP. My version of Outlook has an option to attach to Google, it seems. Just decide whether you will “download and delete” or “download but leave on server”. If you access the same email from multiple devices like your phone, don’t delete when downloading to your PC.
Exactly. I assume one of these days, the local internet provider will stop offering their email service - after all, why run email servers with all the hassle that includes, when Google or Microsoft or Yahoo will do it for you. A number of businesses I’ve seen have switched their email to MS Outlook (outlook.com) instead of upgrading their email servers, as you can point the business’s personalized domain name to Outlook servers.
But for you as a person, switching everything between different email addresses is a major hassle, particularly if the old email becomes discontinued after a time. Avoid doing that too many times. I had, for example, purchased an Adobe product and then 5 years later when my old email no longer works, Adobe won’t allow my login so I cannot recover my license key to re-install it. More and more businesses want to send a verification code to your email address if you try to login. Are you sure you converted all of them to the new address?