Normally, Outlook will send and receive on its own just fine. But it’s also good to know how to make it send and receive e-mail for those times that you just can’t wait for that message to arrive, or for when there’s mail waiting to be sent! Remember, the options below will only show up once you’ve set up an e-mail account.

 

There are a few ways to make Outlook send and receive e-mail:

 

- Press the F9 key on your keyboard.

- Click the send/receive button on the toolbar.

- Click Tools menu, click Send/Receive, and click on Send/Receive All.

 

How can you tell if you’ve received mail? Well, if you have new messages, a blue number will appear next to the folder it’s in. (This will only appear in the folder list, not the Shortcut Bar.) This folder is usually the Inbox, but in some situations it will show up to other folders (for example, if you delete an e-mail without reading it). You can see an example below:

 

 

 

 

Let’s talk about Send/Receive settings for a moment. If you click on the Tools menu again and choose Send/Receive, you will see an item in there called Send/Receive Settings. In that sub-menu, we want to choose “Define send/receive groups.” Once again, there are quite a number of options in this box, but the only one’s we’re concerned about is the section labelled “Settings for group “All Accounts.” You can see it circled below:

 

 

Using these three boxes, you can tell Outlook to do an automatic send/receive every certain number of minutes (you can type any number from 1 to 1440 in the box where 5 is in the figure). You can also tell it whether or not you want it to do a send/receive when you close out of Outlook. Once you click Close, your changes are saved.

 

Those are the only options we’re going to look at right now; other options will be covered in the Intermediate and Advanced lessons.