For all personal Microsoft accounts, IMAP is disabled by default. Therefore, if you wish to use IMAP, you first need to enable it in the settings of your account. Since the IMAP options are not always easy to find, we’ve written this short guide to show you how to enable IMAP.
What’s a personal Microsoft account?
Personal Microsoft accounts are Microsoft accounts ending with a Microsoft owned domain. For example, if your email address ends with @outlook.com or @msn.com, you’re using a personal Microsoft account.
➡️ Do you wish to enable IMAP for your Office 365 or Microsoft Exchange account? Have a look at this tutorial.
Why should you enable IMAP for your Outlook.com account?
There are many reasons why you might need to enable IMAP for your Outlook or MSN email account. For example:
- you want to add your Outlook email address to an email client (e.g. the Outlook email client, Thunderbird, Apple Mail…)
- you wish to grant third-party software access to your email account (e.g. clean up your email account using clean.email)
- you need to migrate your emails from or to your Outlook email account
- you want to sync your email account across multiple devices (smartphone, PC, tablet…)
For all these scenarios to work, you need to enable IMAP for your Outlook account first. So let’s see how to do so!
How toEnable IMAP for Outlook / MSN Accounts
To enable IMAP for your personal Microsoft / Outlook account, follow these five steps:
1. Log in to your Outlook account at https://outlook.live.com.
2. Click on the Gear-Icon in the top right corner to open the settings.
3. In the settings window, select Mail (if not already selected) and click on Forwarding and IMAP.
4. Scroll down to the section POP and IMAP. Here, enable Let devices and apps use IMAP
5. Save your changes by clicking on the Save button.
🥳 That’s all! You successfully enabled IMAP for your Outlook / personal Microsoft account.
Learn More:
After enabling IMAP, you might be searching for the current Outlook IMAP settings. If so, have a look at this up-to-date list.
In case you’re experiencing errors when adding your Outlook email account to your email client or email migration tool, learn how to fix the most common IMAP errors quickly.
In case you wish to migrate your existing emails to your new Outlook / personal Microsoft email account, simply follow this email migration tutorial.
