When you Receive Messages

Let’s talk about how Outlook receives and manages messages from more than one account at a time. Outlook will automatically checks each email account (the settings in your Send/Receive groups determine when). Messages from most types of email accounts end up in the Inbox, while messages from HTTP mail accounts, like Hotmail, end up in their own collection of mail folders.

Wondering how you will know which messages are associated with which accounts? It turns out that’s easy. The Hotmail messages end up in their own set of folders. For the others, if you can’t tell simple by who they’re from, you can look at the To: field of the message. The email address the sender addressed it to appears here.

Except when it doesn’t. Sometimes you’ll see a nickname instead of the email address in the To: field. If there’s a nickname, following these steps will show you the actual email address associated with that nickname:

Sending Messages from Multiple Accounts

When you are sending messages, you’re in control of which account Outlook uses. Outlook always has a default account for sending messages (usually the first account you set up), but you can tell Outlook to use a different account. Here’s how it works:

The way Outlook selects the account to use makes great sense, but what if you don’t want to use the account Outlook thinks you want to use? How do you tell Outlook to use a different account? That’s easy.

You tell Outlook which email account to use when you have the message window open. When you have multiple accounts set up, you will see an Account button below the Send button. Click the Account button, and Outlook will display a menu containing all your e-mail accounts. Select one, and Outlook uses that one to send your message.

Changing the Default Account

You may sometimes decide that you want Outlook to use a different email account as your default. If you want to change the default, follow these steps:

With this information, you are ready to manage your multiple email accounts.