Archiving your Emails with Outlook and Gmail
April 30th, 2010
1 comment
Users who use Outlook with IMAP to access their Gmail account (whether regular Gmail or Google Apps Gmail) will have problems when they attempt to archive their Emails using Outlook AutoArchive or manually initiating an Outlook archiving process.
There are 2 issues that prevent archiving from being successful with Outlook:
- Gmail Related Problem: Gmail manages Emails in a different way than what usually Email Servers/Services do.
- Gmail uses labels instead of folders. Multiple labels can be assigned to the same Email; and when you get a new Email it will automatically have 2 labels: Inbox and “All Mail”.
- Gmail uses the “All Mail” label as the place where you should be archiving your Emails. This means, you will never have to delete any Email and you will always be able to access old Emails.
- Outlook Related Problem: Outlook has an odd method for archiving Emails; it makes use of the most recent date of Sent, Received, and Modified dates of an Email. There are various reasons on why the Modified date of an Email would get updated and it is most apparent when you have an IMAP account; as soon as you connect to the IMAP server and have Emails synchronized, the Modified date will be set to the Current date! This makes the archiving process virtually only relying on the Modified date. An attempt to archive Emails using Outlook may result in archiving nothing! More about this is available at the Microsoft article (do NOT follow their lame workaround).
In this tutorial, we will tackle these issues by
- Modifying the Gmail Settings to change its behavior with Outlook and IMAP.
- Using third-party software, called MailStore, to archive your Emails depending on the Sent and Received dates of your Emails.
(Outlook 2007 is used in this tutorial)
