Outlook.com Tip: Send Email from Another Account

When I started writing a series of Outlook.com tips last summer, Microsoft didn’t provide an elegant way to use Outlook.com to send email from other accounts, somewhat mitigating its appeal. But this week, Microsoft added that capability, called Send Email, and you can now safely aggregate all of your other email accounts through Outlook.com if you’d like.

Before this change, Outlook.com would let you send email from other account, but it would be marked as coming “on behalf of” or “via” your Outlook.com account, which many people found unacceptable. The Send Email feature removes this limitation, so you can now aggregate multiple accounts through Outlook.com and send email from any of them.

You may recall that there are two ways in which to consolidate email accounts through Outlook.com. You can collect email from your other accounts using Outlook.com, or you can forward email from your other accounts to Outlook.com. I recommend the latter, as there is no way to configure how frequently Outlook.com collects mail from other accounts, while forwarding is immediate.

Given this, I will assume that you are forwarding email from one or more other email accounts to Outlook.com (as I am). And I will further assume that you now wish to configure Outlook.com to be able to send email from those accounts. For this post, I’ll use a Gmail account as an example.

Here’s how it works.

From the Outlook.com web interface, choose Settings (gear), More email settings, and then Your email accounts.

From this page, click the “Add a send-and-receive account” button under Add an email account.

Note: Do not choose “Add a send-only account” even though that appears to be the right choice. If you do, you will still send mail the old way, using “on behalf of.” Gmail should still forward email normally, even though Outlook.com is occasionally polling Gmail for new messages too.

In the Add a send-and-receive account page that appears, enter the email address and password of the account you’d like to be able to send email from using Outlook.com. In my case, I’ve entered my Gmail credentials.

Then, click Next.

If you’re not immediately successful, there are a few things to consider:

POP Download.  In Gmail at least, POP access must be enabled for this to work. You can check this by visiting Settings (gear), Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP in Gmail.

Two-factor authentication. If you’ve enabled two-factor authentication in Gmail, you’ll need to create an application-specific password and use that as the password in this form in Outlook.com. (You do this through Google account settings, Security, 2-step verification (Settings button), Manage application-specific passwords.

If all goes well, you will be asked where you’d like new email from that account to appear. Click Save when you’re ready to move on. When the account is created, click Go to your inbox.

Now, when you construct a new email message, you click your name in the upper left corner and choose from the available accounts. In my case, this includes my actual Hotmail account, an Outlook.com alias, and the newly added Gmail account.

And message sent this way will not include any “on behalf of” or “via” text. They will appear to come from the actual email service.

Additional Tip: You can even use one of these other accounts as your default “from” address. To do so, navigate to Settings (gear), More email settings, and then Your email accounts again, and scroll to the bottom. Under Default “From” address, choose the account you prefer.