Last weekend, I set up my father-in-law’s new PC and needed to get Windows Mail (the built-in client in Windows Vista that replaces Outlook Express) working with his ISP’s mail server.  The ISP in question is Tiscali, but I still wanted the messages to be available on the server for webmail access, so I wanted to use IMAP and not POP to collect e-mail.

Tiscali’s instructions seem to be for Outlook Express and POP3 (at least the ones I found were) but I decided to see if they offered an IMAP service and it seems they do – all I needed to provide to Windows was some basic account information (name, username and password), the incoming server name (imap.tiscali.co.uk) and outgoing server (smtp.tiscali.co.uk).  At first sight, some of the mail folders were missing but they were easily made visible by selecting IMAP Folders… from the Tools menu.

Finally, to tidy up the experience I remapped some of the special folders Trash/Spam/Sent instead of the Microsoft defaults of Deleted Items/Junk E-mail/Sent Items in the account properties and hid the unused ones from view.