If you’ve wanted to use Outlook.com with an email client that doesn’t support Exchange ActiveSync, today is your lucky day.
As a part of an AMA with the Outlook.com team on Reddit, Steve Kafka, a Senior Program Manager Lead at Microsoft, said that the company is making IMAP access available to all Outlook.com users today.
“While we believe that EAS is the most robust protocol for connecting to your email, with syncing in near real time, and superior battery and network efficiency, there are still some devices and apps that haven’t made the upgrade to EAS. As an older protocol, IMAP is widely supported on feature phones and other email clients such as those on a Mac,” Kafka wrote in a blog post on the topic.
In addition, Microsoft is also enabling OAuth login using Outlook.com, so that users can use their Outlook.com accounts to log into a variety of other apps. At launch, the company has partnered with TripIt, Sift, Slice, OtherInbox, motley*bunch and Unroll.me.
If you want to set up IMAP right away, here are the technical details, per Steve’s post:
IMAP
- Incoming IMAP mail server: imap-mail.outlook.com
- Incoming IMAP mail server port: 993
- Encryption: SSL
SMTP
- Outgoing SMTP mail server: smtp-mail.outlook.com
- Outgoing SMTP mail server port: 587
- Encryption: TLS
For more in-depth instructions, check out the blog post announcing the change.
