Setting Up Outlook 2010 for home-network access

Hi,

I have recently purchased a HP Laptop and its running Windows 7, I also have a HP Desktop running XP. My internet connection is through a BT Home Hub with an attached remote hard drive which I can see from both computers. cable on desktop and wireless on laptop. I'm pretty green when it comes to technical set ups.

I have just purchased Microsoft Office Home and business and have installed on both machines, I would ideally like to start using Outlook (currently use Thunderbird on the desktop to download my Bt/Yahoo emails (5 family email accounts)) I have heard that I can set up outlook on my remote hard drive so I can use outlook on both the desktop and the laptop and sycronise all of the different email accounts i.e. I can look at my emails on the laptop without the desktop being on.

Is this achievable and if so does anyone have a step by step guide????

Many Thanks

John W

It is achievable, if you have the proper kind of e-mail account. What you want is an IMAP connection. POP3 is dead, comfining, and to the best of my reasoning, I can't understand why anyone would stick with it anymore. IMAP works nearly like a corporate Exchange setup, where your e-mail is resident on the mail server, and each of your client systems can connect in and manage it. I use my own domain for e-mail, and I access it through Windows Live Mail on three separate computers.

It sounds like you just need to enable the option in Outlook to leave a copy of the messages on the server, if they are POP3. I don't know if Yahoo allows IMAP, but if it does, I'd use that. Outlook also doesn't handle multiple accounts as well as some of the other products out there.

Hi there
another advantage of IMAP is that if you have say a laptop and a desktop computer you can access the email with the SAME account since the mail is left on the server until you move it to another folder on to your LOCAL machine LOCAL folder.

However once you've moved email onto a LOCAL folder you won't be able to access that mail from another machine - but you can move it to a shared drive on your LAN.

You can also backup / copy folders with the pfbkup.exe tool -- quite useful.
Although it says 2007 it works for 2010 too.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

You can also backup / copy folders with the pfbkup.exe tool -- quite useful.
Although it says 2007 it works for 2010 too.

Hi, jimbo! Great advice. :)

I really miss the pfbackup add-in. It does, indeed, work with Outlook 2010 but only with the 32 bit version. Unfortunately, it's incompatible with the 64 bit version (I'm referring to the Office version and not the Windows version).