Send and Receive Options in Outlook 2003 and Outook 2007

Changing the send and receive options in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 are very similar. The send and receive options will let you manage how your email program sends and receives your email.

This is the question I received through email:

“I have Outlook 2003 and I receive e-mails okay but I have to actually click the send/receive button before I know I have them.  I have been all over trying to find it.  Can you help me?”

To change all of the send and receive settings to your preferred options you will need to access the Outlook options. This is easy and is the same for both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.

Simply press on the Tools menu at the top of the Outlook email program. Then choose Options from the menu. See the screenshot below.

When the options open you will find many choices in front of you. You must be careful what you change in here as it can sometimes stop the program from sending and receiving emails all together. There fore to be safe I only like to change one setting at a time, test how the program works, then feel safe enough to change other settings. This way I can always remember what setting needs to be changed back if there is a problem.

Below are some common send and receive options that you might want to change.

Configure Outlook to Send Immediately

Most computer users want to send their email imediately when they press the send button.

To do this in Outlook you simply:

1. Access Outlook options as shown above.
2. Click on the Mail Setup tab.
3. Under the Send/Receive sub heading make the box is ticked next to ” Send immediately when connected“. See the screenshot below.

This will make sure your email is sent as soon as you push the send button. If you do not have this checked your emial will be sent to the outbox to wait for the next send/recieve time that is scedualed.

Get Outlook to Send and Receive More Often

It is all up to you when Outlook send and receives email. If you are not happy with your current options you can simply change them to suit your needs. I personally like to set my send and receive options to automatically do its job every 30 minutes or sometimes less.

How to Change the Send/Receive Options

1. Access Outlook options as shown above.
2. Go to the Mail Setup tab.
3. Press on the Send/Receive button as shown in the screenshot below.

4. Now you will see the options for groups. All of your email accounts are placed in the All accounts group by default.

5. Under the sub heading of Sending for group “All Accounts” tick the box next to “schedule an automatic Send/Receive every“

6. Now choose a preferred number of minutes. I have 30 minutes for my options. See the screenshot below.

7. That’s it!

Now my email will be checked every 30 minutes, however I can make this less if I like but I found it became annoying.

Set Send and Receive Options for Groups

If you have only one account, the default All Accounts group is all you need. but if you want to get into more details you can create a customized group and set different options for that. For example if you only want to check a certain email account every 5 minutes and other account s every 30 minutes then you could do this be creating a new group and separating the accounts.

Either way, it is very easy to change the send and receive options in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.