How to Set Up IMAP in Outlook 2013

Introduction

In our company, we've ported our old POP3 system into a shiny new IMAP system... coming from Blackberry to Android, this has been a natural and convenient move as now we will be able to read e-mails everywhere.

The issues have appeared when trying to set Outlook to work and cope with our mail server which it doesn't support XLIST.

If you try to set Outlook 2013 up and when you send an e-mail, it is not stored in your Sent folder, this is for you.

This is only a trick/hack to get it working as you expect and it has a small drawback as it will keep your sent e-mails marked as unread, but there's also a solution for that... :)

Oh, and I've not tested it in other versions, but it looks like this is only happening in Outlook 2013 and in older than 2003 versions of Outlook.

There is another thing that's important when speaking about IMAP and Outlook... If you have an antivirus software that checks your mail, it can make it impossible to synchronize correctly. Those days, I've been testing our IMAP server against a lot of devices and clients and Thunderbird was also giving problems when the Antivirus software was active...

Background

You will need only patience and to follow the simple and generic (they won't be extremely specific) steps to get it to work as expected.

You will have to know how to set a rule up in Outlook 2013 and also how to configure e-mail accounts there.

Making the Setup to Avoid Losing Sent E-mails

• Set up your account as always in your Outlook 2013.
• When you've set the main parameters, you will have to go to set up other options by pressing the "More settings" button.
  • Make as many modifications here as you need to get your mail working as expected.
  • Go to the Advanced tab and in the Sent Items, disable the option that keeps a copy of your e-mails in the Sent folder (as Outlook can't see that folder you will lose those e-mails and moreover, you'll get an error each time you send an e-mail).
    • Notice that in the Spanish version of Outlook, you have to uncheck it, searching the Internet I've noticed that in the English versions, it looks like you've got to check it. The idea here is to AVOID storing a copy of your mails in your server.
• Once you've finished with your settings, subscribe your mail folders:
  • Right click your inbox folder, select IMAP FOLDERS.
    • Press the "Consultation" (Google translate here :( ) button.
    • Select all the folders you are still not subscribed to and press the "Subscribe" button.
• Now you will have your e-mail ready to work, the pending issue will be that your sent e-mails will be lost. To solve that, simply create a new rule that will send a copy of your sent e-mails to your sent folder.

How to Prevent those E-mails Stored in your Sent Items to be Shown as Unread

You could simply mark them as read manually (which can be tedious) or create a small VBA script to automate the process. In order to do that, please take a look at this article.