Outlook 2019 Need to retain emails in Outlook but delete from phone

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So after being forced to move to Exchange accounts, I now have 5 inboxes instead of one and multiple rules that worked fine for POP3 and IMAP don’t any longer.

Moving on, I get emails on my Android phone in the Outlook app as well as on my desktop in Outlook 2019. At least two of these accounts are also accessed on another desktop computer also with Outlook 2019. My issue is that once I have read the email on the phone if I am away from my desk, I don’t need to keep most of them on the phone since they should be on the desktop application.

However, if I delete them on the phone, they also delete on both desktop computers, even though they had already been downloaded into Outlook 2019.

I haven’t figured out how to stop this behavior so that the emails will stay on the two desktops after I remove them from the phone.

Any ideas?

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JTinLV wrote:

However, if I delete them on the phone, they also delete on both desktop computers, even though they had already been downloaded into Outlook 2019. I haven’t figured out how to stop this behavior so that the emails will stay on the two desktops after I remove them from the phone.

This is the design of an IMAP account…multiple access to the same emails which are kept on a Mail server. Any action on the emails will cause that action (such as delete) on those emails on the server which changes the emails on the server. Another device that connects to the server will “download” what’s on the Mail server (or what’s no longer on the server). With IMAP the emails are not downloaded to keep (unless you do so yourself), but to match what is on the Mail server.

Options to get what you want are:
1)If you want to keep an email on a PC, then you must transfer the email to a separate folder or Outlook Data File.
Saving the emails to a shared folder on the same Network could allow two different PCs to access the saved emails.

2)The best thing to do is to move the emails to another IMAP folder that you create and synced so the emails are not in the Inbox on your phone. You will still be able to access the emails in that folder from another PC, but won’t be in your way on the phone.

3)Another method depends upon your mail provider, such as GMail.  When you delete an email from the Trash folder in Outlook (mobile or PC) a copy of that email still remains on the Mail server in another folder.  For Gmail the folder is called All Mail and that folder has a different name in other mail providers.  By default, Outlook doesn’t display or sync this folder so you might not know that it is there.  You can add and sync this folder to the folders that display in Outlook on the PCs.  You will be able to access this folder from these PCs which is access to the emails that were deleted from the Trash folder by the Phone.  Let me know if you need instructions for this setup.

 

HTH, Dana:))

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So, not sure what you are answering but it doesn’t answer my question. There are no IMAP accounts in use and if you read the first sentence, I state that these are Exchange accounts.

So, to repeat myself and maybe clarify, we have Exchange accounts only but when an email is downloaded to Outlook 2019, as well as onto the Android phone, when the email is deleted on the phone it is also deleted in Outlook. The reverse does not occur, so if I delete an email in Outlook, it remains on the phone.

What I need to be able to have happen is the email stays on Outlook until I decide to delete it, regardless of what happens to the copy on the phone,

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Exchange is IMAP, not POP.
In most IMAP clients you can choose to sync (or not) certain folders on the server.
Dana is suggesting you create a new folder from the desktop and not sync it on the phone.

cheers, Paul

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Pual,

Either I have been seriously misinformed or somehow we are not on the same applications or something. So my email goes through GoDaddy, who changed their email servers and forced everyone to use Exchange/O365. Due to that, I could not use POP3 or IMAP and can only select Exchange as the mail type. IMAP is not given as an option.

So, where I formerly had one inbox and then was able to use rules to filter emails into subfolders if I wanted, now I have 5 separate inboxes. I also get emails for all of them on my phone using the Outlook app, plus two of the accounts also need to be accessed on two other desktop computers running Outlook 2019. Those computers are not accessed daily and so the emails need to stay on the server for at least a few days.

Given all that, the issue becomes that even if the email has been downloaded on one computer and also read on the phone, if I delete it from the phone it is deleted on the server, so it isn’t available to be downloaded on either of the two other computers.

So how do I keep the emails from being deleted from the server if I delete them on the phone? This also happens even after I have retrieved the email on the first computer, then delete it on the phone, it deletes from that computer. As another little twist, if I delete it from that computer, it does not delete on the phone and I have to manually delete it there since I don’t need them on the phone once I have dealt with them.

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Deleting an email deletes it from the server. This is how IMAP/ Exchange works.

cheers, Paul

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So, you are going against how email is designed. What you want is a “local only delete setting” applied to the delete function. Not aware of an email service or email protocol that will do what you want.

However, the design feature you want makes sense to me. (Don’t get me started on how inflexible the Email protocols are.)

Windows 10 22H2 desktops & laptops on Dell, HP, ASUS; No servers, no domain.

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See and that is the issue here. The functionality I want/need is what was the way things worked with with email system that was in place. While each email client could download messages from the server and deleting on one device did not affect the others, now that appears to be the only method. So much for ” progress, this is a loss of function.

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Sounds like you want POP3 back. POP3 downloads emails from server to client and then deletes them at the server in order to avoid server getting full, but this can be configurable not to delete as well. In POP3, the downloaded emails at the clients are local and managed locally, regardless of what is on the server.

IMAP is a synch of clients to the server. So, if you delete something at the server, it’s going to also disappear at the clients. To avoid this, I have a secondary inbox on my client that I move all my emails to after email send/receive so that when I clean up the server to make space, it doesn’t screw me at my clients.

 

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