tapman.net

I have a love/hate relationship with Outlook that’s hard to break because there is some great stuff about Outlook but also some hidden gotcha’s that really piss me off. Here’s the solution to one of them.

IMAP accounts are handy for keeping everything synchronized with an email server and still enjoying the benefits of a local email client software suite, like Outlook. I use IMAP as much as possible because I use several computers regularly and webmail just isn’t right all the time. I recently restructured some email accounts and needed to create a new Outlook account using IMAP. One of the gotcha’s I ran into was how to save sent messages into the Sent folder on the IMAP server instead of having Outlook save them into the local Sent Items folder. Why’s this an issue? Primarily because if the emails aren’t saved onto the IMAP server I will have no access to them on my other computers.

To configure this solution follow these steps in Outlook 2007:

1. Navigate to Tools | Options | E-mail Options… and make sure the “Save copies of messages in Sent Items folder” is checked, then click OK;
2. In that same Options dialog box (Tools | Options) click the second tab, Mail Setup, and the first button, E-mail Accounts, then double click on the email account you’re trying to configure;
3. A new dialog box opens, Change E-mail Account, click the More Settings button in the lower right;
4. A new dialog box opens, Internet E-mail Setting, click the second tab, Folders;
5. Select the second radio button, “Choose an existing…” and then select the folder from the list below where you want to save your sent items, you can create a new folder if necessary;
6. Click OK then Next, then Finish, then Close, then OK;
7. Send a test message to yourself or someone else and see if the message was saved successfully to the IMAP Sent folder.

And then sit back, look at the above process and contemplate what sort of corporate stupidity leads to this type of obfuscated process for such a simple task. The equivalent in Thunderbird is to right click on the account name, select the Copies & Folders section, and select the right folder from the available list…about 4 or 5 total steps and it only requires a single dialog box to be opened.