Deleted Emails Keep Downloading into Outlook

I agree to using IMAP.
Since you keep messages on the server without time restriction, POP3 doesn't make much sense. There are also reports that your setup doesn't work with Gmail, only delete on receive (not keeping mails at Gmail) might.
IMAP caches the mailbox contents, so every change you make on the server or client will be reflected at the other side.

Hi David and Qlemo,

Thank you both for replying. I have been working on cleaning up my email in preparation for switching to IMAP. I want to clean up my InBox before switching to IMAP because won't it potentially upload to Gmail messages in my InBox that are no longer there?

I oversimplified the situation. First, I have several email accounts on mydomain.com that all feed into MS Outlook that were established almost 20 years ago.  The website at mydomain.com was taken offline last month, but I will continue to use these email addresses for at least a year.  Over the years my Outlook PST file grew so large that I started to move old emails into Archives. Yesterday, when I opened Outlook I have my current PST (that was approximately 8 GB in size - likely stuffed with duplicates) and 5 different archives ranging from 500MB to 1.5GB in size.  I am almost done consolidating all the emails for mydomain.com that were in all the archives into a single archive that is roughly 4GB in size. All personal emails in the 5 archives have been moved into my current PST file which is approaching 12GB now. I now have two PST files - a personal one with emails dating back to roughly 2001 and a work PST for all emails to mydomain.com. Once this is done I will close the work PST file in Outlook and will only open it on an as needed basis.

I checked my Gmail settings and IMAP was disabled on all of the mydomain.com emails.  I can enable it on all of my email addresses but want to be sure I understand how this will work so I will not create a nightmare.

My personal PST has over 10,000 emails in the Inbox and 20+ folders, many of them with subfolders.  If I enable IMAP will it end up uploading all my Inbox emails to Gmail's servers that are not already online? What about all the emails in folders?

On a related note, any suggestions on how to identify and delete duplicate messages in an Outlook PST?

Thanks!!

If you switch to IMAP, you'll create a new (OST) mailbox file, hence no uploading will take place. Because of the caching nature of IMAP accounts no mix up of accounts is possible, each account has its own file.

Hi Qlemo,

I have never used IMAP. Please walk me through the steps.  Do I first enable IMAP on all three google email accounts? Then do I change each account settings in Outlook from POP3 to IMAP?

At what point will the new OST file be created?
What happens to my 10,000+ emails in my current PST file? Can I move them over to the OST file?
When you say each account has its own OST, do you mean that name1@mydomain.com. name2@mydomain.com, myname@gmail.com will all have their own OST files?

One thing I am confused about is that everything worked fine for several years with the email accounts at mydomain.com.  It is just when I added the gmail account to Outlook and stopped forwarding gmail emails to mydomain, did this problem come up.

No comment has been added to this question in more than 21 days, so it is now classified as abandoned.

I have recommended this question be closed as follows:

Split:
-- 'Qlemo' (https:#a43378155)
-- 'David Johnson, CD' (https:#a43377752)


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