Do you have an AOL email address that you just can’t give up? Have you had your AOL email address for years and years now and it is just unthinkable to get rid of it? But deep down you are sick of the way the AOL email client makes you write emails, tiny screens, silly spell checker, lockups and heaven forbid if you want to embed a graphic image in an email!

Well there is something you can do, you can check, send and compose emails using Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail.

In this tutorial I will go over the steps to setting up an email account in Microsoft Outlook 2003.

First thing you want to do is click Tools to bring up the drop down menu, then click E-mail Accounts...

Select the Add a new e-mail account radio button. 

Now you should see the E-mail Accounts pop-up box. Select the IMAP radio button and click Next.

You should see the main E-mail Accounts box now.

Fill out the information as below substituting your email and user information for mine.

User Information
Your Name: The name you want on your emails.
E-mail Address: Your email address

Server Information
Incoming Mail Server (IMAP): Use imap.aol.com
Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP): Use smtp.aol.com

Logon Information
User Name: Use your AOL screen name, do not put the aol.com at the end of it.
Password: Uh, your AOL Password.

When you have done this then click on the More Settings option.

This should bring up the Internet E-mail Settings box, the General tab should be the default. The first text box is called Mail Account, give this a descriptive name, if you are like me you might have a bunch of different active emails accounts in Outlook. By giving a descriptive name you will know easily which account you are editing. Then you just fill in your Organization/Name and return email address.

Next click the Outgoing Server tab, and click the My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication. One more thing to go!

Click on the Advanced tab, change the Outgoing server (SMTP): box from 25 to 587, then click OK.

Now lets go ahead and test this, I will try to send an email to myself using Outlook 2003 via AOL. First I compose the email then send it.

Success!

 Then I logged into my AOl account via the web and checked my Sent Items folder, the email I sent in Outlook is here also! The only problem is that you can not use the folders directly in Outlook like you can in the native AOL client, but other than that it works like a champ!