In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps to get Gmail setup in Outlook 2010. I will also talk about how to get it to work if you have 2-step verification enabled on your Gmail account. Overall, it’s not a very complicated procedure, but it still helps to explain it sometimes.
The first thing you’ll want to do is to log into your Gmail account and click on the Settings icon at the top right, then click on Mail Settings.
Next, click on Fowarding and POP/IMAP and make sure that IMAP is enabled. I would recommend disabling POP as it’s not nearly are powerful as the IMAP protocol. The preferred choice nowadays is IMAP. It keeps the client and the server in sync rather than having two separate copies of your email.
The next thing you’ll want to do is fire up Outlook 2010 and then click on the File menu option at the top. Click on the Account Settings button and then click on Account Settings.
Now under the Email tab, you’re going to want to click the New button.
A dialog will pop up where you can enter the email account info. Just type in your name, your Gmail address and your password. If you are setup with 2-step verification, go to your Gmail settings and create a new application password for Outlook. Then just copy and paste the application password in Outlook.
Click Next and Outlook 2010 will do the rest for you! Yes, it’s really that simple! It will login for you and even send you a test email on your Gmail account to verify everything is working properly.
You’ll now see the new Gmail account setup in Outlook 2010 as shown below.
That’s it! Now it will download all your labels, which will be represented as folder in Outlook 2010. The middle pane will show the emails and the reading pane on the right will have the content of the current email just like a normal email setup in Outlook.
You should be all set at this point. The main things to remember are to enable IMAP on your Gmail account and to create a new application password if you are using 2-step verification with Gmail. Now whenever you delete an email in Outlook, it will delete from your Gmail account and vice versa.
If you have any questions or you are getting an error during the process, post a comment here with the details and I’ll try to help you! Enjoy!