How to Set Up Telus.net Email Account in Office 2007

Over the last weekend, I received a job to set up an email account for a customer who purchased a desktop from the store I am working at. His email account was provided by telus; I initially thought it was going to be fairly easy to set up because while I googled online, I found numerous tutorials explaining how to set up email accounts. Yet, I was wrong after I got my hands on the job.

I haven’t used Telus email account before (even thought I have one myself); just in case it has special ports for incoming and outgoing emails, I strictly followed what’s telling me to do HERE. Basically, the setting is as described in the following picture:

Source: Telus.com

a) Your Name: the name people will see when an email is sent to them
b) E-mail Address: your username that was provided by TELUS at the time of your service order followed by @telus.net. For example “[email protected]”
c) Incoming mail server (IMAP): imap.telus.net
d) Outgoing mail Server (SMTP): smtp.telus.net
e) Username: this was provided by TELUS at the time of your service order
f) Password: type in your password which was created at the time of your service order
g) Check the box beside Remember password.

However, after tried a couple times — I tried automatic setting and manual setting, I still couldn’t get the email account working. At first, I thought it might be the problem of Outlook 2007 or maybe it was my problem since I haven’t used Windows for quite a while. I then use the same setting to give it a try with Mail.app on Snow Leopard AND Thunderbird on Ubuntu but Same result was obtained, . At that moment, I started to question did the person who wrote this “official guide” actually try it before the article was posted online?

I didn’t want to waste my time calling up Telus tech-support; it was a Saturday and I really didn’t think they could help much. Just a side note that I tried to call them up on the same problem with Mail on Snow Leopard before, but they blamed the problem on Apple because Mail 3 was just released. Therefore, I sat down and started to think of any possibilities of solutions. At first I tried to alternated the ports and then I tried to change some security settings. However, none of  these help.

Then I started to wonder if Telus would hosted different email servers on the same physical server? For example, they might gives away @telus.net email accounts to their internet users while they keep @telus.com for their employees. If this is the case, it’s possible that the username will be duplicated. Let’s say, there is a username PGordon, and there is a staff also had a username PGordon, if Telus doesn’t separate the email server, then conflicts will occur. Usually, like Google Apps, they will use the whole email address as the username to make sure users at different email domain will have a unique identification.

So I kept all the setting the same and change the username to full email address. AND IT WORKED! Problem solved and I hope this quick tip will help you with your email setting for Telus.net email.

Post note:

I hope the technical writers could take a look at this post because if the official guide doesn’t work for the end users, they will just receive more complain phone calls. So far as I know, the mistakes have been there for quite a while; it’s been at least seven months since I called them last time. Just a nice thing to do, I believe I will send them an email and hopefully they will correct it. If there is any updated news, I will post them up here.