How to Set Up Your Email in Microsoft Outlook (2016, 2019, 2021 and Microsoft 365) Print

Who this is for

This guide covers adding your Linuxweb email account to any modern version of Microsoft Outlook on Windows, including Outlook 2016, 2019, 2021 and the Outlook that comes with Microsoft 365. The steps are the same across all of these versions.

We recommend IMAP rather than POP3. IMAP keeps your mail synchronised across all your devices, a message read on your phone shows as read in Outlook too, and nothing gets stranded on one device. The full reasoning, and every port and setting used below, lives in our email settings and ports quick reference.

What you'll need before you start

• Your email address, for example you@yourdomain.tld.
• Your mailbox password. This is the password set when the mailbox was created in cPanel, it is not your cPanel or client area password. If it is lost, reset it in cPanel under Email Accounts, or see our article on changing your mailbox password from webmail.
• Your mail server name: mail.yourdomain.tld, replacing yourdomain.tld with your own domain.

Your mail server settings

Step-by-step setup

1. Open Outlook and go to Account Settings. Click File in the top left corner, then Add Account. If Outlook is opening for the first time it prompts you to add an account automatically, continue to the next step.
2. Enter your email address, then click Advanced options, tick Let me set up my account manually, and click Connect.
3. Choose IMAP on the account type screen. Not Exchange, not Microsoft 365, IMAP.
4. Enter the incoming settings: server mail.yourdomain.tld, port 993, encryption SSL/TLS. Click Next.
5. Enter your mailbox password and click Connect. If the incoming connection succeeds, Outlook moves on automatically.
6. Enter the outgoing settings if prompted: server mail.yourdomain.tld, port 587, encryption STARTTLS. Click Next or Connect.
7. Finish. Outlook tests the connection and confirms the account. Click Done. Your inbox begins syncing, and a mailbox with years of history can take a while on the first pass.

If Outlook auto-detects and gets it wrong

Newer versions of Outlook, especially under Microsoft 365, sometimes guess your settings and guess badly, ending in a connection error. If that happens: go Back or into Change account settings, confirm the type is IMAP, and enter the settings from the table manually, ports exactly 993 in and 587 out, SSL/TLS incoming and STARTTLS outgoing.

Common problems

• "Something went wrong, we couldn't set this up automatically." Outlook simply failed to auto-detect. Go back, choose manual setup, and enter the settings yourself.
• Outlook keeps asking for your password. First prove the password by logging in to webmail at yourdomain.tld/webmail. If webmail accepts it, the password is fine, remove the account from Outlook and re-add it manually, and confirm the username is the full email address, not just the part before the @.
• Mail arrives but won't send. The outgoing settings are wrong. Under File, Account Settings, Account Settings, select the account, Change, More Settings, Outgoing Server, tick My outgoing server requires authentication with Use same settings as incoming, and confirm port 587 with STARTTLS on the Advanced tab. The full explanation lives in our article on the 554 relay access denied error.
• Mail sends but replies never arrive. Log in to webmail: if the replies are there, the mailbox is fine and Outlook's sync is the issue, see our article on webmail and your mail program showing different emails. If they are not in webmail either, the problem is delivery, start with our article on email delayed or stuck.
• Your sent mail lands in recipients' spam folders. Not an Outlook problem, it is domain authentication, see our article on why your email lands in spam, covering SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
• A certificate or security warning appears during setup. Don't click past it, see our article on SSL certificate warnings when setting up email for the causes and the safe fix.
• Sending is unusually slow and the mailbox is huge. See our article on Outlook being very slow to send with a large IMAP mailbox.

Good to know

Outlook keeps its own synchronised copy of your mailbox, so webmail at yourdomain.tld/webmail is always the quickest second opinion: if something looks wrong in Outlook but right in webmail, the mailbox is healthy and the problem is local to Outlook. And if you ever stop using this computer, removing the account from Outlook does not delete any mail, with IMAP everything lives on the server and simply reappears wherever you set the account up next.