Linking online accounts to Mail, People, and Calendar

- [Voiceover] This chapter is all about three essential applications that come bundled with Windows 10, Mail, Calendar, and People. The Mail application of course is for working with email. The Calendar application is for scheduling appointments, including appointment reminders, and the People application might not be so obvious, but that's the address book application. All three of these applications can tie into online accounts, specifically email accounts. In fact, the mail application will not work at all unless it's been connected to an online account.

Thus could be your Microsoft account, or some other email account. So in this movie, before we get into the specifics of how to use Mail, Calendar, and People, let's see how we can connect them to your online accounts. So I wanna start by launching the Mail application. I'll do that by going into the start menu, and I have it pinned as a tile here on the start menu so I'll click on that. When you launch Mail for the first time you'll see this screen, and I'm gonna hit the get started button to go to the next screen here.

Now you're not gonna be able to do anything until you link an online account. That's not true with the People and the Calendar app. You can launch and work with those applications with out setting up an online account, but of course you get more options if you do link an account, but you will need to link a email account to get the Mail application running. This is an important point. We are not creating a new email account. You have to come to this with an email account all ready set up. Maybe you have a Gmail account, or a Yahoo account, or iCloud, or an email account assigned to you by your employer.

What we are doing here is connecting every email account you all ready have to the Mail, Calendar, and People apps. In my case I see that I all ready have my outlook account listed here. Remember back in the first chapter we talked about setting up your account for your computer? You can use a Microsoft online account to log into your computer, or you can use a basic local account. Since I set up this computer with a Microsoft online account, it has that account information all ready setup here, and I could just hit ready to go, and I could start using this application with my Outlook email account.

So in this case I do not have to setup another account, but if you setup your computer to sign in with a basic local account then you will need to link some other online account. Maybe your Gmail, or iCloud, or Yahoo email account. Since Microsoft account is all ready setup, I could just move on, but I do wanna setup a second account. You can link as many accounts as you want. So I'm gonna hit this button that says add account. These are the different accounts that you could setup. If you have an Outlook account, or a Microsoft Exchange account you could set that up.

Generally whatever account you choose you're going to need to plug in your email address and your password, but some of them will require a little bit more information. Specifically Exchange, this will very often require some extra information. Now most people who have an Exchange account are provided that account by their employer or their business. Sometimes a school will set up an Exchange account for you. So in that case you may need to contact your IT department to get the information that you will need to plug in here.

Now if you have a Google, Yahoo, or iCloud account, these are really easy. You just plug in your email address and your password and you're good to go. If you have some other type of account. Maybe something that's provided to you by your home internet provider, it will probably be a POP or iMap account, and when you go through that set up, of course you will need to provide your email address and password, but again there will be other information. Like an incoming server address or outgoing server address, port numbers, stuff like that.

Specific information that it will be looking for, that again, you'll have to get from your email provider. So you may have to talk to tech support, or you may have to dig through the documentation to find that information. I'm just gonna setup a Google account for now. This is a pretty typical account that a lot of people have, and it will be easy to setup. So I'm going to click on Google, and I'll have to plug in my email address. I'll hit next, and then I'll plug in my password and hit sign in.

It's going to confirm that I want to allow my computer to have permission to access this information from my Google account. That's fine, I'll hit allow. Then I'll hit done. Now I have two accounts setup top work in the Mail application, and because I set those accounts up here in the Mail application, they'll also be setup inside the address book in the People applications as well as we will see in just a moment. Okay, now I am all set and I can start using the mail application. So I'll hit this button that says ready to go.

So now I'm here in the mail application and we are going to spend time specifically on how to use this application to send and receive email messages in another movie in this chapter, but for now I wanna take a look on the sidebar, where its says accounts. I have both of those accounts listed. So I could click on Outlook, and I can see the messages in my inbox, and this inbox is pretty empty. I only have one message there. I could go to my Gmail account, and I can see all the messages that I have there. If I needed to add another new account, remove an account, or make some changes to how my accounts sync, I can go to the settings by accessing this little gear button down in the bottom of the window.

It opens up this fly out panel. I can hit manage accounts. From here I could select an account, and I could delete it. I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna hit cancel, Or I could add another account from here, and when I'm done in settings. I can click outside of that, and that panel goes away. Okay, so that's all I wanted to see in the Mail application for now. Again we will come back to this application in another movie. For now I want you to see once you have these accounts setup in Mail, they are also available in the other applications as well.

So I'm gonna go into the start menu and I want to launch the Calendar application. I also have that as a tile here on the start menu, so I'll click on that. I'll hit get started. You can see that it confirms that the same accounts that I had setup in Mail are here as well. Now a quick note here, there are some accounts that will work in the Mail application, but will not synchronize to the address book or the Calendar application. So you may see more accounts setup in Mail, and fewer accounts in the People app and the Calendar app.

Just because those don't sync with those other applications, but both of the accounts that I have do sync with the Calendar. So, I can hit ready to go. Now I can see my calendar. I all ready have a bunch of appointments set up in these calendars. If I scroll on the side here, you can see I've got my Outlook account. Scroll down a bit more, and I have my Gmail account, and all the calendars associated with that, and if I go into the People app, I'll have to scroll down here in my list of all apps to find that, I all ready see some people here in my address book because those synchronize to my address book, from my Gmail account, and if I hit the little gear button down in the bottom to access settings.

You can see again I have my Outlook account and my Gmail account synchronized here. Okay so we saw that we can add these accounts in the Mail application, and they will automatically be available in both the Calendar and address book applications. That's one way to do this. For what it's worth, there is another way to add these accounts into your computer so they are accessible by these three applications. You could go into settings, so I'm gonna go into the start menu, into settings, then into the section of accounts, and you will see there's an area here for email and app accounts.

When I click on that again I see those same accounts that I setup inside Mail, and I could add a new account here, or I could select one of these. I could hit manage, and I could delete it from there. So that's just another way of getting to this same information and adding accounts. So now my online accounts are setup to work with Mail, Calendar, and People. We can dive into how to use these individual applications in the rest of the chapter, and I know that I will be able to send and receive my email from my Outlook and Gmail accounts and any information I put into my calendar and address book will sync back to those same accounts.