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Weird Outlook 2010 behaviour, any ideas?

A question to the Microsoft cracks here.

I am using Outlook 2010 onto a Pop3 email account. I also use webmail on the same account, to read when I am away.

Recently I noticed that mails I’ve read on the webmail account are no longer imported into Outlook, which is a major problem. I have activated the option, that Outlook is not allowed to delete any mails on the server, since day one, and from that direction it works.

Any ideas on this? Are there any options I can use to force Outlook to import the whole inbox, no matter if the mails are previously read or not? MS help is no help in this, I suppose not many people use this kind of server anymore.

Thanks a lot.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Mooney_Driver wrote:

I am using Outlook 2010 onto a Pop3 email account. I also use webmail on the same account, to read when I am away.

Not sure if pop3 is right thing here… Try IMAP?

EGTR

It depends on whether your email server is running POP3 or IMAP. The two are very different.

Webmail is just a “window” onto the email server database, which can be also accessed via other means (POP3, IMAP, etc).

If you are seeing emails in the webmail interface but those emails are not being downloaded into the POP3 email client, but very recent email do get downloaded, then it could be that the email client has got out of sync. The way this stuff works is that the email client keeps track of which emails have already been downloaded, so it doesn’t download them over and over. This is described e.g. here. I don’t know how such an issue would be fixed in Outlook, however. Perhaps uninstalling Outlook and reinstalling it would help but that’s a pretty dirty way to do it because you may have to set up all the credentials again. I did a google but could not find anything which looked usable. There are descriptions of how to hack the UID storage but it is complicated.

Another thing is that if your email client is configured to leave messages on the server, what will be deleting those messages? Something has to otherwise the server will fill up.

BTW there is nothing wrong with POP3. It is a good old protocol which works perfectly. You just have to carefully config all but one of the clients to leave messages on the server, and config just one client to not leave them on the server. That client will then become your email archive and you need a “backup policy” for it. With IMAP you need a “backup policy” for the server on which the emails sit, so you are merely moving the backup job from one place to another.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

POP3 over TLS then? (If it’s even supported) We should avoid any clear text protocols these days.

Last Edited by martin-esmi at 04 Nov 21:19

arj1 wrote:

Not sure if pop3 is right thing here… Try IMAP?

Pop 3. Has been so for 20 years. Probably it could also do Imap but so far I have not seen a reason to change it.

Peter wrote:

Webmail is just a “window” onto the email server database, which can be also accessed via other means (POP3, IMAP, etc).

Exactly.

Peter wrote:

Another thing is that if your email client is configured to leave messages on the server, what will be deleting those messages? Something has to otherwise the server will fill up.

The server is configured to delete messages older than 1 month, unless they are flagged unread. Works.

The key problem is: Outlook appears to ignore messages flagged read on the server. It has not done that before, but it appears to do so since a few weeks. I am sure this is some kind of configuration problem which started with an update, but it should be possible to force outlook to totally sync with the server, that is to take all messages regardless of status.

I used to work wtih Virtual Access and still would if I could. Unfortunately VA does not do HTML and PHP well. So I changed to outlook, also because it works with our work calendar.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Yes, POP3 over TLS is fairly common today. Android phones, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc, support it. Even industrial stuff uses TLS because it is so fashionable (and it is truly horrible to implement – we are working on one at work now). This is another story but it is a challenge if you want to keep emails way back. I have emails back to 1995 and it has saved my skin a few times at work, with customers trying to screw us and we were able to pull up emails from year 2000 showing they agreed to something… So people have to choose between keeping old emails (and keeping them instantly accessible), and using some modern email system. So I use POP3 too

It is news to me that you can have a POP3 server and the read/unread status of an email is tagged on the server. Normally that happens at the email client. The setup here seems to imply that when the email client downloads emails, it sees the read/unread status; I didn’t know that is passed in the POP3 protocol.

Somebody here should know. I wonder if @stevelup is still out there?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Time is a precious resource. Use Office 365.

United States

Come on… this guy is looking for a solution, not for a Microsoft sales pitch.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Lucius wrote:

Time is a precious resource. Use Office 365.

For this very reason, I’m avoiding Microsoft software as much as I possibly can.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden
9 Posts
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