Having a personalised email address feels good and is at most times necessary for people in business. More and more organisations do not want you to send them official emails through a gmail or yahoo account. Companies and institutions offering tenders want the email correspondence sent through info@example.com emails. Outlook is one of the most popular email clients that allows you to manage your emails from the desktop. As such, it is becoming more crucial to understand basic troubleshooting that could help you fix issues arising from Outlook before escalating them to the hosting company support team – which may take more time to resolve as other support issues may be in queue. Here are some of the issues and how they can be delt with.

1. Outlook will not log on into mail server when trying to send test email.

This is because the log in credentials provided may be incorrect. Make sure you provide the user name as your full email address eg [email protected] and it’s password as set in the cpanel. Confirm the password by resetting it in cPanel to make sure you are using the correct one.

2. Outlook will not send the test message even after log on is successful.

This is because an invalid mail server was specified. You will need to access the first setup page and confirm that your incoming and outgoing mail servers are as specified. They should be mail.example.com if you use Linux hosting and example.com if you use Windows hosting – where example.com is your domain name. Also, under More settings>>Outgoing server, make sure you have checked the option “My outgoing server(SMTP) requires authentication”. Under that select “Use same settings as my incoming mail server”

3. Outlook won’t send or receive emails after transfer of hosting.

This is because the email hosting has changed servers. To fix this, you need to repair the Outlook configuration settings. To repair settings, go to Account settings then select the account you want to repair and click Repair. Fill in the details as required and test the settings.

4. Outlook fetches emails from long ago again via POP3.

After a while, Outlook may start fetching old emails again without any particular order. This happens when the emails fetched by outlook are so many that the local PST file is full and breaks. When full, the Outlook PST file gets corrupted and looses track of messages downloaded. When this happens, Outlook loses track of the emails that were fetched and will keep fetching old emails a new. The best solution is to use IMAP instead of POP3. Imap mirrors the emails in the server while POP downloads the emails.

5. Outlook on Android will not finish configuration due to invalid server certificate.

Outlook for android will not complete set up if the server certificate where your emails are hosted is invalid, i.e. is expired. An error indicating the same will appear in case you set up an email on outlook on the phone. One example when this error appears is when AutoSSL expires. AutoSSL is a free server side certificate that comes with cPanel. It automatically gets installed for domains without SSL – allowing secure coonnection for email clients such as Outlook. However, this certificate expires after a while hence causing an issue in Outlook for android email syncronisation. The solution to this is to subscribe for premium SSL certificate for your website so that you enjoy a more stable connection to the server via SSL.