Outlook 2013 imap Gmail Frustrations

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Dairyxox

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#130853 30-Sep-2013 17:57

Hugely Frustrated with my new Office 2013 Purchase.

It basically doesnt work with a 'moderately used' gmail account via imap.

What do I mean doesn't work? It stops receiving email in the inbox.

Some background information. Ive got an free gmail account with a few gigs of emails. I use this with imap no problem on mac mail, and iphone & ipad email clients.

I want the same imap goodness on my windows pc.
I purchased office 2013 for nearly $350 nzd.
I setup the same imap account in the new outlook 2013 on Thursday last week.
It seems to work, I send & recieve emails ok, and all my folders are present, and on Friday things are fine.

Monday back at work, and now i'm not getting any new emails. The last emails are from Sunday. I can send emails OK, but the inbox never updates. Other imap folders are present and brows-able. I can create new folders and delete them. Still no update to my inbox. Webmail and other imap clients show the correct up to date inbox

Check all the settings, and they all seem ok. So I call Microsoft to see whats up....

Microsoft Customer Service Representative uses remote access and checks my settings & creates a new outlook profile, sets imap to only get 1 months emails and tests. The new emails show up. But now (most) emails saved in my folders are not visible (because they might be from over 1 month ago).

I politely explain that this is not satisfactory, and he increases the outlook imap settings to retrieve ALL, and says to leave it syncing and it may take a long time. Things seem ok, but an hour later the inbox stops working like before.

The microsoft CSR says "thats OK we'll just set it up as POP". Which I politely decline, since I want the same folders, emails, and deletions across all devices.

The microsoft CSR then says their software is fine the problem is 'Server Issues', and there is nothing more he can do.

The CSR says there are too many emails for it to sync (about 21,000), and it would work if I had less emails or a new gmail imap account. This isnt something I can change easily, it is an email address after-all.

Now it doesnt matter what settings I have outlook imap set to (1 months emails). The inbox never updates. The only solution that works is to create a new mail profile when this happens.

I have also tried limiting gmails imap settings to only 1000 emails per folder. This didn't make any difference.
Tried turning off the email scanning in the Nod32 Antivirus. This didn't make any difference.

Now I'm a bit pissed. I don't get why other email clients work fine with gmail imap, but outlook 2013 doesn't. Kind of wish I could just return it, and just use thunderbird or virtually any other email client that works fine with imap, but CGA doesnt apply to business purposes.

Why am I forced to use pop, accept limited functionality (non accessible data from other devices), with the latest 2013 software. It feels more like I'm stuck in 1998 with Microsoft. I thought outlook was the best, especially in dealing with lots of emails. Turns out its the worst.

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#905270 30-Sep-2013 18:05

That's annoying. Outlook to me is really only for using with Exchange, Thunderbird is better for general IMAP.

sbiddle

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#905274 30-Sep-2013 18:14

Outlook has never had good IMAP support, and to be honest I wouldn't go near a an IMAP solution as I dislike it.

If you want sync across multiple devices incl Outlook the best option is ActiveSync.

TwoSeven

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#905280 30-Sep-2013 18:22

I was reading online where having similar issues - a recurring recommendation was to use POP instead, as the IMap support in Outlook isn't all that good. The issue that I was trying to resolve was how to get all IMap mail from multiple accounts into one set of folders (inbox) like one can do with POP accounts. There was a long-winded solution but people were saying that it stopped working after about a month.

Having said that, I have found that Google GMail does not support the POP DELE command which means it doesn't delete emails once they have been retrieved from the server (when requested to by the mail client). GMail has some bizarre options related to this command.

This is not an issue if you only access GMail from a single mail client, but if like me you have a laptop or another device and want the second device to leave mail on the server, prepare to either not receive emails or receive them twice, and even receive copies of sent mails (depending on the setting chosen).

Unfortunately I have been unable to figure out how to report a defect back to the GMail development team without posting in the public forums and getting nonsense replies.

I am not sure if you have an Hotmail account (Outlook.com) but you may want to try and replicate the issue using that. If you can, then the issue may well be Outlook, if not, then it may be yet another issue with GMail.

just my thoughts

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sbiddle

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#905282 30-Sep-2013 18:26

Don't ever use POP if you want to keep mail in two places at once. The standatd was never designed for this, and despite there being hacks to get around this ultimately it will always lead to tears.

Dairyxox

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#905353 30-Sep-2013 19:44

In my opinion they need to be more like samsung, just hurry up and copy apples imap behavior.
Even in 1998 they must have realised simply retrieving everything all at once is a poor method of getting email.

Ill look into activesync, but thought it had been kind of depreciated?

TwoSeven

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#905654 1-Oct-2013 12:38

sbiddle: Don't ever use POP if you want to keep mail in two places at once. The standatd was never designed for this, and despite there being hacks to get around this ultimately it will always lead to tears.

Having recently just been reading through said standard, and having a little experience of developing for it in the past, and given how many years it has been working and how many people use it and how many people use multiple devices and how many years email clients have had the 'do not delete mail on the server feature'. I am not so sure that I agree with this rather general assertation.

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timbosan

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#905689 1-Oct-2013 13:05

Funny enough I get the EXACT same issue, as I use GMAIL and Outlook. I am on the way to changing to Exchange with my own domain name, so don't mind these issues as they are not going to be there forever.

However, with the SYNC problem, I find just exiting Outlook and restarting it fixes the problem. I delete emails on my iPhone in the GMAIL app and they delete from Outlook in less than a minute.

Overall it's not 100% but it does give me the advantages of IMAP without using POP (been there, done that, never again).

Personally though moving from GMAIL will be a great thing - having control over my email without Google/NSA/800,000 USA IT staff/etc. being able to measure or mine me for information, or having to deal with GMAIL issues such as these, will make me happy.

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#905690 1-Oct-2013 13:08

I have been wildly unimpressed with the stability of 2013 amongst our clients. Even last night when I imaged my wife's OS to a new hard disk, after that Office 2013 wouldn't even start, had to remove and uninstall and reinstall to get it operational. I can't speak to imap hassles as I avoid it like the plague, however we have spent quite a bit of time dealing with a number of issues in 2013. The fact you can't downgrade with PKC is balls as well!

sbiddle

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#905691 1-Oct-2013 13:13

TwoSeven:
sbiddle: Don't ever use POP if you want to keep mail in two places at once. The standatd was never designed for this, and despite there being hacks to get around this ultimately it will always lead to tears.

Having recently just been reading through said standard, and having a little experience of developing for it in the past, and given how many years it has been working and how many people use it and how many people use multiple devices and how many years email clients have had the 'do not delete mail on the server feature'. I am not so sure that I agree with this rather general assertation.

The problem is it's so easy to break your entire setup. All it takes is one person to reconfigure or misconfigure a client and you'll find your years of POP email are suddenly deleted.

ArcticSilver

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#905864 1-Oct-2013 18:00

Personally I would highly recommend you get EM Client http://www.emclient.com/

I use it for IMAP, Caldav (calendering) and carddav (contacts) in a production setup for my business.

Microsoft have dropped the ball with IMAP for a very long time, IMAP works well with other products (such as EM Client) but I have never found it stable on Outlook.

1101

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#907025 3-Oct-2013 12:47

sbiddle: Don't ever use POP if you want to keep mail in two places at once. The standard was never designed for this, and despite there being hacks to get around this ultimately it will always lead to tears.

I'd have to agree, despite having set this sort of thing up several times.

The issue is that Joe Public doesnt comprehend the issues of the same pop a/c on multiple devices.
They expect it to just work, perfectly , without any issues.
Try explaining that sent items & the other folders dont get synced & you get a blank response of disbelief.
They see friends using exchange for email on multiple devices & expect pop to work the same .

Then you have the issue of unticking the del from server option, and you'll get 5 years of old emails coming down when you set up that pop a/c on a new pc

TwoSeven

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#907046 3-Oct-2013 13:08

Yip, and then there are those of use that do understand the connotations of using the same account across multiple devices and also understand the requirements of not keeping data in the cloud/stored on an IMAP server.

Over many decades I have found it better to educate the user than to tell them (or to prevent them) from doing something. What is it about the story of teaching someone to catch fish.

I think the underlying issue is that Microsoft have put so many resources into getting people into the cloud, they have forgotten that they still need to put resources into the stuff that we already have for those people that don't/cant use the cloud (of which I might point out there are about 5.8 billion or so).

I would use IMap if it provided the same feature set as POP such as bringing emails from multiple accounts into one mail folder, being able to send through multiple accounts and being able to mark email retention as keep on server/don't keep on server (or even keep for 30 days - if one is familiar with apple) when using multiple devices. I can do all of this on POP now and have been able to for nearly 30 years, but it cant really be done in Outlook (and I don't care about other mail programs - I need to use outlook) when using IMAP.

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mattwnz

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#907064 3-Oct-2013 13:30

I must be one of the few people that still use and prefer pop for my main account. Although I do use IMAP for some other business ones.
I still use pop with multiple devices, but once a day, I download all the email off the server onto a local computer. Part of the reason though, is my provider only offers pop, and no IMAP.

nathan

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#907092 3-Oct-2013 13:51

are you up to date with the latest Outlook 2013 updates?

a bunch of IMAP synch breaking bugs were fixed in the September release

and performance improvements coming in SP1 which is shipping shortly

MurrayM

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#907159 3-Oct-2013 14:37

I've tried in the past using Gmail and IMAP with Outlook but found it a bit flaky.

My current setup is Thunderbird on my various PC's and the Gmail app on my phone. Thunderbird works well with Gmail and IMAP.

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