Chris Alexander
28th September, 2010
So the Uni have now begun rolling out readingLive (a rebrand of Live@edu) to all students, so once mine was activated this evening I proceeded to update my Gmail settings (as described in my previous post on [how to make University e-mail usable (#2847)) and ran into a whole stack of problems. I would go so far as to say the process was a nightmare. So here is what I learnt so that the same problems do not befall you.
This may seem like a simple one, but it’s not. Here are the principles:
Simple.
What this actually means is that if you go to Outlook.com and try and sign in, all kinds of bad things will happen. readingLive seems only to work if you sign on from https://live.reading.ac.uk. So don’t go trying to sign in from anywhere else, it will end badly.
Surprisingly, IMAP POP and SMTP are available in this release. Unsurprisingly, they are nigh-on impossible to set up (someone really liked Outlook web, it seems).
Therefore there are some issues you will have setting this up, undoubtedly as I and numerous other people did.
First of all: neither IMAP, POP, SMTP or Exchange will work unless you reset your password and change it. After about 2 hours of rage I found this information hidden away on this page on the Uni website. This means you have to go through the password reset process, and actually change your password (unlike what I did, which is reset it to the same thing, which didn’t have any effect whatsoever).
How to change your password:
By the way, to get out of the Options window, the only way out I could find is the tiny “My Mail” link in the top right just underneath the logo.
So now that’s out of the way, time to go actually implement this stuff. If you want to use Exchange or ActiveSync or something like that, go ahead and do it now, you’re sorted! Make sure you use your full username in the form username@live.reading.ac.uk and the password you just reset to! Everyone else, one more thing to do…
We need to grab a piece of information first which is the cluster of servers we are running on. To do this:
The full POP/IMAP/SMTP settings are below:
Server: podXXXXX.outlook.com (from earlier)
Port: 995
Encryption: SSL (this is required to be enabled, check the Advanced section of your client for this bit)
Server: podXXXXX.outlook.com (from earlier)
Port: 993
Encryption: SSL (this is required to be enabled, check the Advanced section of your client for this bit)
Server: podXXXXX.outlook.com (from earlier)
Port: 587
Encryption: TLS Important note: SMTP here does not support SSL, you will get a “Server Unreachable” error if you try with SSL. When enabling Gmail to do this, do not check the SSL box. Gmail uses TLS automatically, but adding the SSL will break it.
Hope all these tips helped - let me know if you have more!