MS Outlook & Gmail

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My friend just got a new computer with windows 10 and Microsoft 365 productivity software.  I am trying to help him get up and going, but I am not having much luck with  MS Outlook.

1)      How can he have MS Outlook get copies of the e-mails he gets in the gmail account that he receives on his Samsung Android phone?

2)      If we can do 1) above, will he have a copy of the e-mail in both his desktop MS Outlook App and on his phone also?

3)      If he deletes an e-mail in either MS Outlook or his cell phone, will it also delete it from the  other devices e-mail account, or are each controlled independently?

4)      If he creates an e-mail in one device, will it appear on the other device also?

As you can tell by my questions, I don’t know what I am doing, so I would appreciate any help you can provide concerning this problem because I have not been able to make this happen and I was told it could be done.

Thank you in advance for your assistance and cooperation.

Sincerely,

Howard D. Keney

Moderator note: Personal information (address, email, phone) removed for security reasons.

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hdkeney wrote:

) How can he have MS Outlook get copies of the e-mails he gets in the gmail account that he receives on his Samsung Android phone?

Is this “online” Outlook, local application on a PC, local application on the phone, or what exactly?

There’s a specific instruction page for exactly this at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-a-gmail-account-to-outlook-70191667-9c52-4581-990e-e30318c2c081?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us covering the latest versions of Outlook on Windows and Mac.

Another page has information on doing this for Outlook on Android, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/set-up-email-in-the-outlook-for-android-app-886db551-8dfa-4fd5-b835-f8e532091872

For older versions of Outlook (don’t remember the cutoff point for 365, should’ve been a while ago though), Gmail can be set to allow IMAP, standalone Outlook can do that since pretty much forever.

IMAP is not on in Gmail by default, see https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?hl=en on how to enable it. That page also lists the server addresses you need to configure client-side, meaning into Outlook (if it doesn’t recognize them based on a @gmail.com address).

The detailed instructions for these older versions of Outlook are at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-an-email-account-to-outlook-6e27792a-9267-4aa4-8bb6-c84ef146101b – follow the directions for the IMAP-type account.

hdkeney wrote:

)2) If we can do 1) above, will he have a copy of the e-mail in both his desktop MS Outlook App and on his phone also?

Yes, by default at least the latest mails. Older might not be synchronized so might not be available when offline.

hdkeney wrote:

)3) If he deletes an e-mail in either MS Outlook or his cell phone, will it also delete it from the other devices e-mail account, or are each controlled independently?

It should, eventually, depending on sync settings.

Also Outlook can have local-only folders, if you move a message to one of those it’s deleted from the server and so from other clients too on next sync.

Deleting a message on one client and moving the same message to other folder on another client “simultaneously” (between sync runs, so one of them just after takeoff on a long flight and the other just prior to landing is simultaneous enough) can cause weird things to happen sometimes.

hdkeney wrote:

)4) If he creates an e-mail in one device, will it appear on the other device also?

Yes, on subsequent sync runs, assuming drafts, sent mails etc. are also synced to server. IIRC this was on by default but not sure, and it can be turned off.

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Only one other thing to mention is that Gmail regards Outlook (in my case 2010) as “insecure”.  You cannot use your Gmail account password in Outlook long-term, but will have to generate a “more secure” password in Gmail, and cut-and-paste that into your Outlook password field.

See this link in Google: sign-in using app passwords

Hope that helps.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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I have been using gmail for many years. I use Outlook from Microsoft 365. I access gmail via IMAP, and access it all also from my iPad and iPhone.  I keep a lot of my emails, divided up into folders and subfolders in my gmail account.

Lately, I noticed that many emails have disappeared and I cannot figure out why. I am way under the storage capacity limitation in gmail.

I am wondering if I should change to POP instead of IMAP in my Outlook email client.

If I do what happens to all existing emails and their folders?

What happens with the iPad and iPhone access, should I change those too or leave them as IMAP?

Do I leave all emails on the server as well?

Does that mean that all emails are stored locally on my pc in Outlook,. as well as the gmail server?

I am afraid that in the process of making the change, everything will be lost!

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[mn--]

Well.

I’d say you probably don’t want to do this.

POP doesn’t do folders.
Some POP servers have a feature where you can log in with a folder prefix, thereby accessing only a single server-side folder.
Other servers just show all mails in a single inbox, I’m told Gmail does it this way but haven’t checked.

POP doesn’t really play nice with multiple devices. You might get messages downloaded to multiple if you’re careful, but any status updates (read, replied, flagged, deleted…) won’t go anywhere.
Also it really doesn’t do syncing of a “sent” folder. (Sure, you could just bcc yourself.)

Ken wrote:

Does that mean that all emails are stored locally on my pc in Outlook,. as well as the gmail server?

With IMAP, this is what I’d expect you to have now. (And also on the iPad and iPhone.)

POP can do “all received mails on all devices” but typically loses folder structure and read status, always loses replied/flagged status, and doesn’t upload sent mails. And have to do a delete separately on each device.

If you want to have them only on your pc locally, that’s something POP is good at. (That means not getting them on your phone and tablet.)

If you want to have them only on the server, a custom configuration with IMAP could do that… or just use the web interface with a browser.

Ken wrote:

I am afraid that in the process of making the change, everything will be lost!

Easy to do with POP by accident, yes. Less easy with IMAP…

With IMAP on mobile devices it’s easy to lose single mails though, particularly if there’s a delete on swipe … delete actions get synced to server and from there to other devices.

And some phones are really sensitive with the swipe action.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by mn--. Reason: Forgot to mention how delete behaves WRT IMAP/POP differences

2 users thanked author for this post.

Robert Smith, Ken

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Wow! I thought that could be a problem, but your reply convinces me not to do it!

Any way to prevent other emails from disappearing? As an example, I buy a lot of stuff on the internet, I store all order confirmations in a folder dedicated to that vendor.  But, I know I ordered X from a vendor, but their folder is empty! (The folder would not exist if I had not ordered from them before and saved the confirmation there.)

I have more important stuff on other folders, would not want that to vanish.

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[Mr. Austin]

I’ve been using a similar approach to this for many years, using, Outlook, Gmail, my smartphone, my desktop and my laptop. For my porpoises I use POP rather than IMAP because that way Gmail (set only up as relay servers) can be emptied of old e-mail I no longer want stored in the cloud. I blessed Outlook as my mail’s mothership:  I store and archive everything locally (on my computers) via Outlook. My phone is set up as a temporary viewing device which soon pours its mail contents into Outlook on my desktop or laptop.

With those overly-simplified strategies mentioned, unless you or your friend want to make yourselves mini-expert on mail protocols, including mail client softwares, and cloud storage, you’d pull less of your hair out by its roots if y’all instead have someone expert do whatever you need  for you 😉

Human, who sports only naturally-occurring DNA ~ oneironaut ~ broadcaster

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Mr. Austin.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Mr. Austin.

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[Paul T]

Check that gmail / your client is not auto-archiving your mail.

And backup your local mail store at least once a week.

cheers, Paul

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Paul T.

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Ken

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Yes, there are over 15,000 emails in the “all mail” folder in gmail, including all the trash. No way to find anything as it is all a jumble in chronological order.

I backup my Outlook daily: but since what it is backing up is the local copy of the server files and folders, as soon as they change on the server, they also change locally. The only way I see to find any missing emails would be to save all backups forever. Right now I only save 14 days of backups, which includes two full backups and various incremental backups.

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You can afford to keep a years worth of backups – disks are cheap, data is not.

cheers, Paul

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Ken

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In the general case, “simply” backing up the .pst file directly as a whole file tends to be inefficient, since it’s just one file for all the data and the changes seem to happen in multiple locations even for a small change, so file incremental changes grow very quickly too.

Utilities that can back up individual items from within the .pst file do exist (usually with a price tag), using those for longer retention and incrementals can be a lot more effective with disk space.

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mn– wrote:

Utilities that can back up individual items from within the .pst file do exist (usually with a price tag), using those for longer retention and incrementals can be a lot more effective with disk space.

Thank you for your input. Can you advise me what utilities you refer to?

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Ken wrote:

Can you advise me what utilities you refer to?

Well, there’s any number of “enterprise backup solutions” that have Outlook integration to the degree that they can recover single emails from client local storage. Usually expensive, slightly less expensive is server-based backup for Exchange (or Office 365).
I have used some of these before.

Then there’s a bunch of smaller utilities that only do Outlook. Someone else has a small list of those up at http://carlcheo.com/best-microsoft-outlook-backup-software-and-tools … that list may not be exhaustive or even correct, but it says some of those have a free version with limitations or ads. Haven’t used any of these myself, but this is where I’d look for a small business or home user who’s decided on Outlook.

Then of course there’s the “cheap” way… use something other than Outlook that stores data in an easier format. Like something that’d store the mail in Maildir format, as in a directory structure where each message is in its own file, so any file-based backup tool can backup/restore single messages. This is what I use myself at home… and also at jobs where organization policy doesn’t disallow it. (Can also do this in addition to using Outlook, where allowed.)

(Current versions of Thunderbird can do the latter; what I prefer to use is … somewhat different, and has been around longer than that capability in Thunderbird.)

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Ken

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I have been using EaseUS Todo backup for many years. It’s free or paid. It does a very good job of backing up Outlook. I tried a couple of those mentioned in your link, they did not do what they advertised: only backed up the .pst file. EaseUS backs up the individual emails and you can select them individually to restore, or even just to view.

Paul suggested saving a year’s worth of emails: what about 10 years or more? I don’t think that is the solution. I wish there were a way to prevent what happened to me in Gmail. I don’t know if another email program would be better.

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Ken wrote:

I tried a couple of those mentioned in your link, they did not do what they advertised: only backed up the .pst file.

Oh, that’s a bother. One even promised to back up the autocomplete cache, which is something really not end-user friendly at all…

(Yes, I’ve done that with MFCMAPI but…)

Ken wrote:

EaseUS backs up the individual emails and you can select them individually to restore, or even just to view.

Should be one of the good ones then.

Ken wrote:

Paul suggested saving a year’s worth of emails: what about 10 years or more?

I do that, yes… but without Outlook.

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Ken wrote:

Yes, there are over 15,000 emails in the “all mail” folder in gmail

What about an archive in Outlook?

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

What about an archive in Outlook?

Setting auto-archive archives everything that is more than 1-60 days old, and puts it all in a pst file. The setting only allows archiving of items up to 60 months old. Are the older ones are deleted or left there?

Just clicking the “archive” icon puts everything into an archive folder without identifying what folder it came from…. same as the “all mail” folder in gmail.

 

mn– wrote:

I do that, yes… but without Outlook.

How?

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Ken wrote:

How?

Well, for a start, Outlook doesn’t normally run on Linux anyway.

I prefer to sync everything over to local Maildir folders, then my local mail applications use those Maildir folders directly. I can just take the older messages as individual files or whole folders and move/copy those to an archive subtree, which may or may not be on a separate device.

Since the individual files don’t change much, it’s very efficient with incremental backups. And the mail applications don’t actually need to open the archive folders on every run.

The problem with this is of course that current servers don’t allow access to calendars and such that way. Used to work with old versions of on-premises Microsoft Exchange, though…. but nowadays I have to use something else for that.

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A Central Archive for All Emails

Internet mailboxes such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail
Any POP3 and IMAP mailboxes
Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019
Windows Mail und Windows Live Mail
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019 mailboxes
Microsoft Office 365 (Exchange Online)
Mozilla Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
PST, EML and other files

All Emails Securely Stored in the Archive

https://www.oldergeeks.com/downloads/file.php?id=454

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Ken

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You could just use the direct link, MailStore Home.

cheers, Paul

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lenrdbik, Ken, Alex5723

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I went through the main website, it looks like the solution I am looking for! I will test it in the next few days.

Thank you to all.

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