Set up email in Microsoft Outlook

Add a cPanel mailbox to Outlook on Windows or Mac with the exact IMAP and SMTP settings, and fix the errors that stop setup completing.

Add a mailbox you created in cPanel to Microsoft Outlook, so you send and receive from your own domain in the app you already use. Applies to shared, reseller and Premium hosting, on every current Outlook version for Windows and Mac.

You need two things before you start:

Your full email address, including the domain — you@example.com.
Your mailbox password, set when the mailbox was created. It is not your WebGee account password. If you do not have it, reset it rather than guess — see Change a mailbox password or quota.

If the mailbox does not exist yet, create it first.

Which Outlook you have

Windows ships two different applications both called Outlook, and they add accounts in different places. Check which one is open before following any steps:

Classic Outlook — installed with Microsoft 365, Office 2016, 2019, 2021 or 2024. It has a File menu in the top-left corner.
New Outlook for Windows — the app that replaced Windows Mail. It has no File menu, and usually shows a New Outlook toggle in the top-right.

Outlook for Mac is a third variant again, covered further down.

The settings Outlook needs

Replace example.com with your own domain throughout.

Setting	Incoming (IMAP)	Outgoing (SMTP)
Server	`mail.example.com`	`mail.example.com`
Port	`993`	`465`
Encryption	SSL/TLS	SSL/TLS
Username	`you@example.com`	`you@example.com`
Password	your mailbox password	your mailbox password
Authentication	Normal password	Required, same as incoming

Port 587 with STARTTLS is an equally valid outgoing alternative, and is worth trying if 465 fails — see SSL/TLS and STARTTLS explained.

Choose IMAP, not POP. IMAP keeps mail on the server, so your phone, your laptop and webmail all show the same mailbox. POP downloads messages to one device and, by default, removes them from the server — after which no other device and no backup can reach them. If you have a specific reason to use POP, the port is 995 with SSL/TLS.

The username is the full address, not the part before the @. Entering just the local part is the single most common reason Outlook reports the password as incorrect when the password is fine.

Find your own settings in cPanel

The table above is correct for every WebGee cPanel account, but cPanel will confirm it for the specific mailbox:

In cPanel, type Email Accounts into the search box at the top and open the result.
Find the mailbox in the list and select Connect Devices.
Scroll to Mail Client Manual Settings.

Use the Secure SSL/TLS Settings column. The non-SSL column beside it exists for legacy clients and sends your password over an unencrypted connection — Outlook does not need it.

Add the account in classic Outlook

Let Outlook detect the settings first. If it cannot, the manual route below always works.

Open Outlook. If this is your first account, the setup window opens on its own. Otherwise select File → Add Account.
Enter your full email address.
Select Advanced options and tick Let me set up my account manually.
Select Connect.
Choose IMAP.
Under Incoming mail, enter mail.example.com, port 993, encryption SSL/TLS.
Under Outgoing mail, enter mail.example.com, port 465, encryption SSL/TLS.
Select Next, enter your mailbox password, then Connect.
Select Done.

Confirm outgoing authentication is on

Outlook sometimes completes setup with SMTP authentication switched off, which lets mail arrive but not send. Check it now rather than after the first bounce:

Select File → Account Settings → Account Settings.
Select the account, then Change → More Settings.
On the Outgoing Server tab, tick My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication.
Leave Use same settings as my incoming mail server selected.
Select OK, then Next, then Finish.

Add the account in new Outlook for Windows

Select the Settings gear in the top-right.
Go to Accounts → Email accounts → Add account.
Enter your full email address and select Continue.
If it offers to pick a provider, choose IMAP.
Enter the incoming and outgoing settings from the table above, with your mailbox password.
Select Continue to finish.

New Outlook synchronises IMAP accounts through Microsoft's own servers rather than connecting to mail.example.com directly, so a copy of your mail is held by Microsoft. If that is not acceptable — for confidentiality, or because your organisation's policy forbids it — use classic Outlook, which connects to the server directly.

Add the account in Outlook for Mac

Select Outlook → Settings → Accounts, then Add Account.
Enter your full email address and select Continue.
If asked to choose a provider, select IMAP.
Enter the incoming and outgoing settings from the table above.
Select Add Account.

Calendars and contacts

A cPanel mailbox is mail only. There is no calendar or contact server behind it, so Outlook stores those locally on the device and does not sync them anywhere.

This is a genuine limitation rather than a misconfiguration. If you need shared calendars and contacts across devices, that is what WebGee Workspace provides. Outlook has no built-in CalDAV or CardDAV support, so on Workspace it needs the free Outlook CalDav Synchronizer add-in:

Install the add-in and set up your mailbox for mail as above.
In Outlook, open the CalDav Synchronizer ribbon and select Synchronization Profiles.
Select Add multiple profiles, choose SOGo, then OK.
Select Get IMAP/POP3 account settings.
Select Discover resources and assign to Outlook folders.
In Select Resource, choose your main calendar — usually Personal Calendar — select the … button and assign it to Calendar.
Repeat on the Address Books and Tasks tabs, assigning exactly one of each. Assigning several to the same Outlook folder causes duplicated and deleted entries.
Close each window with OK.

Outlook for Mac cannot do this at all. Use Apple Mail, which handles mail, calendars and contacts together.

Check it worked

Send a message from Outlook to an address you can read elsewhere — a personal account on another provider is ideal.
Confirm it arrives, and that the sender shows as your own domain.
Reply to it from that other account and confirm the reply appears in Outlook within a minute or two.

Testing in both directions matters. Sending and receiving are separate connections with separate settings, so a one-way test tells you nothing about the half that is broken.

If it does not work

Outlook keeps asking for the password. The username must be the full email address. If it is, sign in to webmail at https://webmail.example.com with the same details — if webmail rejects them too, the password is wrong, and resetting it in cPanel is the fix. If webmail accepts them, the problem is in Outlook's settings, not the mailbox.

A certificate warning appears on connecting. The name in the certificate does not match mail.example.com. This happens when the domain is an alias (parked) domain, or when DNS has not finished pointing at the server. Do not accept the warning permanently — use the server's own hostname or webmail.webgee.com in Outlook instead. Both carry valid certificates and work with any mailbox. See Why AutoSSL skips some service subdomains.

Mail arrives but will not send. Three causes, in the order worth checking: SMTP authentication is off — turn it on as above; the outgoing port is 25, which most home and office networks block outright — change it to 465 or 587; or the network blocks 465 as well, in which case 587 with STARTTLS usually gets through. See Fix "550 Please turn on SMTP Authentication".

Outlook insists on a Microsoft 365 password. Autodiscover has matched your domain to Microsoft rather than to WebGee, usually because the domain once used Microsoft 365 and an autodiscover DNS record survived. Remove that record, or skip detection entirely with Let me set up my account manually in step 3.

Outlook from Microsoft 365 will not finish adding the account. That build has a long-standing autodiscover problem, and Outlook from other sources is unaffected. Launch the older account assistant directly:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\OLCFG.EXE

If it opens, add the account from there. If it does not, disable the simplified account creation wizard and add the account again.

Sending works, then stops for an hour. You have hit the hourly outbound limit for the domain. It counts everything the account sends, including mail from your website's contact forms and order confirmations — see Email sending limits.

Old mail is missing after setup. Outlook downloads recent mail first and backfills the rest. Give it time on a large mailbox. If folders are missing rather than messages, select File → Account Settings → Account Settings, open the account, and check that Outlook is subscribed to all IMAP folders.

Bringing mail across from another account

Adding both accounts to Outlook and dragging messages between them works, but it is slow and it loses read and flag states on large mailboxes. Move the mail on the server instead, before you set Outlook up — see Migrate email from another provider.

Set up email in Microsoft Outlook

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