Outlook 2010 and IMAP

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I recently upgraded to Office 2010. Apparently they’ve dropped the Ultimate edition and now the best one out there is the Professional Plus edition. Also unlike its predecessor, any better edition is now a superset of the lower edition. For more information, you should check out the comparison chart on Wikipedia.

I’ve been using Outlook 2010 at work and I love the new UI. It does take a bit to figure out where stuff are. Who knew that all the important settings stuff was stuck inside the orange “File” button. Took me forever to find how to change my settings. But once you have a sense of where things are and your settings are what you want them to be, it’s rather neat!

Anyway, as I mentioned I upgraded to Office 2010 a few days ago on my home PC. At home, I have 5 IMAP accounts. I previously only had 2, but then I added 3 GMail accounts (1 personal, 2 for HDTN). And one thing I always hated about IMAP is deleting emails. IMAP has a weird protocol that marks emails for deletion and requires you to purge them. How Outlook deals with that is by striking a line through that email. And to manually purge your emails, there is no simple shortcut key. You had to navigate through the file menu. It basically resulted to alt+e+g+a (taught to me by Derek).

Now that the ribbon has replaced the file menu, the new convoluted shortcut key is alt+o+r+g+a. At least it spells something that I can easily remember.

However later on, I found a new feature that Outlook 2010 has for deleting IMAP emails. You can now tell Outlook to move your email to a specified folder when you delete (i.e. Deleted Items folder). Another really neat thing about moving emails in Outlook 2010 in IMAP accounts is that it no longer just strikes a line through the old copy. After it’s done copying the email to the new location, it actually marks it for deletion and purges it, like what you would expect moving emails/files to do.

To access this setting:

  1. Click on the orange File button on the upper left-hand corner
  2. Open Account Settings
  3. Double click on the account you want to change
  4. Click on More Settings
  5. Select the Deleted Items tab
  6. Select the 1st option: Move deleted items to the following folder on the server: and select which folder to move it to. If you don’t have an existing folder you’d like to use, you can create a new one on the spot.
  7. Save all your settings
  8. Enjoy!

2 Replies to “Outlook 2010 and IMAP”

  1. Hey buddy,

    Can you please if possible forward me the SCREEN SHOTS for the steps mentioned above? I do not have Outlook 2010 and need these screen shots urgently..

    thanks,
    regards,
    Gurdip Singh

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