You can tell Outlook to send and receive your e-mail when you click the Send/Receive button on the standard toolbar, or when you press F9 on the keyboard. But what if you want to set specific options for different accounts? You can set Send/Receive options by clicking on the Tools menu, clicking on Options, and clicking the Mail Setup tab.

 

 

The set of options circled in blue deals with dial-up connections. If you’re using a dial-up connection, you can use these options to tell Outlook to use your existing dial-up connection, or to ask it to dial during a send/receive. You can also tell Outlook to hang up after it’s done sending and receiving so you don’t have to worry about tying up your phone line. (If you have a high-speed connection, such as DSL or T1, these options don’t apply, although they will still be available.)

 

The set of options circled in red appears to be only one option. Send immediately when connected is checked by default; this tells Outlook to send every message right away (as long as you have an Internet connection).

 

If we click on the button labeled Send/Receive, however, we’ll see a whole new set of options. You can see these options in the picture below.

 

The top part of the window controls your send/receive groups. The All Accounts group (which includes all of your e-mail accounts) will already be set up for you by Outlook. Because it’s the one currently highlighted, the options in the bottom portion of the window apply to the accounts in this group.

 

The options in the bottom part of the Send/Receive Groups window are pretty easy to use. Take a moment to look over the window on the right and see what options are available.

 

The first set of options applies when Outlook is online. The first checkbox tells Outlook whether or not to include this group when you click send/receive on the toolbar (or when you press F9). The next checkbox tells Outlook how often to do a send and receive (you can type the number of minutes in the white box where 10 currently is), and the last checkbox will tell Outlook to do a send/receive when you close the program.

 

Under the section When Outlook is Offline, we have two options. The first tells Outlook whether or not to include the group; the second tells Outlook to do a send/receive every certain number of minutes (again, you can type in the white box where 5 is now). This can be useful if you’re on a dial-up connection. For example, you could set Outlook to do a send/receive every 15 minutes, and also have the options set for Outlook to dial and disconnect automatically. This makes sending and receiving e-mail effortless!

 

Other send/receive settings can be accessed by clicking the Tools menu and clicking Send/Receive, or by clicking the options arrow (▼) next to the Send/Receive button on the standard toolbar. Performing either command will bring up this menu:

 

 

This menu gives you options to send and receive from all accounts or from specified accounts, to send all messages waiting in your outbox, to show the progress of a send/receive currently in progress, or to disable the scheduled send and receive process. These options can be useful to perform one-time actions (like disabling send and receive when you’re offline temporarily).