Better IMAP in Outlook 2010

We are using Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail (2008 & 2009), Thunderbird (2 & 3), Outlook 2007 and now a try to Outlook 2010 with our internal Imap server. Outlook look & feel is nice but what a bad mail client engine! Outlook 2007 & 2010 are the worst (even the free Windows live mail or Thunberdird are better): lots of popups, useless messages, slow, lost of configuration parameters and issue with signed mails (unreadable by other clients). Why not combine your teams to build a really strong Imap engine ? Is Outlook future more than just the exchange client ?

Well, I've using outlook 2010 beta for a couple of months and there is a lot of improvement that you should consider in the release versión: 1) Performance

Why it took a LOT of time to sync with the server? I think that it's the major issue with outlook. Make a litte effort in a better performance with IMAP accounts. Checking email with outlook makes that open a wbe browser and login in the email always faster. 2) Better compatibility with IMAP

Why under my gmail account shows me a folder "Gmail" with an "Alls" subfolder? It looks that storages a every email in my laptop (making a huge 2GB outlook file) 3) Downloading email

Again, why it has to download EVERY mail in the server? It can't download only the header, and when I request the email, downloaded completely, and, after an hour or maybe more (user personalization) of not checking THAT email, delete it from the computer? It wouldn't be better having ALL the headers stored in my laptop than having EVERY mail? 4) Stars in Gmail

I know that there is compatibility with the Gmail Labels (showing as folders, which is Amazing, congratulations guys!, but, better than transforming a Star into some dateless task, can you make it a new Category? 5) Categorization

Maybe I can´t found it, but, also with the only-headers storage, put a personalized Outlook category to any mail which only counts INSIDE outlook and didn't have any relation with IMAP? 6) Sync and public calendars

Wouldn't be great that also with the purchase of the product you can have a litte space in the cloud to sync and share your calendar, tasks and contacts? (for those which didn't hava a Exchange Account). Also a built-in Windows Phone 7 compatibility will be 100% KICK-ASS Otherwise, the improvements to the tasks, calendar an To-Do bar, are great, also the emails "conversations" (which gmails always had, but doesn't matter) are excellent. I hope that you consider our feddback for the final product.

Still no "new mail desktop notification" for IMAP account, only for Pop3 and Exchange!!!! And yes, the performance in RTM are yet very sluggish: the UI thread is blocked too many times, waiting the network processing to complete.

Outlook 2010 (IMAP) is soo dog slow! I can't believe it. Snappier, you say? Switching folders is horrible torment, it is so slow!

The 2 biggest problems we have with IMAP in Outlook 2007 are the following. Have these been corrected? 1. The mail will be delivered to the server, but Oulook will not show the new mail for up to an hour after the server received the message. 2. We will lose "connection" to the IMAP server many times which requires that we go up to the file menu and click on "connect email@domain.com".

I don't really think IMAP in 2010 is anything to brag about. Having used POP3 prior, it is horrendously slow - to the point of frustration. I used to leave Outlook 2007 with POP3 open, but Outlook 2010 with IMAP causes too many problems that I just have to close it.

I'd greatly appreciate the use of custom IMAP-Flags, because some of my tools use them.

If Outlook would also support custom IMAP-Flags, I could cancel using Thunderbird and move to Outlook.

Well, I know that unsatisfied people are the norm (and I am one of them) and my issues are: 1 - Each of my multiple email accounts creates the equivalent of a "Personal Folders" group. By default these groups are collapsed and even though I have the "Inbox" for each account in the "Favorites" section, new/unread email messages don;t populate the index(?) until I expand the appropriate folder group. I will show 6 unread emails (both in the "Favorites" section and on the folder group below), then close Outlook and re-open it. The folder groups will be collapsed and there will be no notification in the "Inbox" in the "Favorites" until I expand the account's folder group, below. 2 - No desktop notification for new messages (set to automatically send/receive every 5 minutes). 3 - Deleting a message still will not send it to the account's "Trash" folder, so I manually move the messages. 4 - Slow and hangs sometimes for circumstances I cannot reproduce. On a philosophical note, I find it insulting that Microsoft employees are forced to tout "improvements" to features they probably dislike themselves. At one time I also thought that the developers could not possibly be using their severely handicapped products.

But it seems more realistic that they are operating under the constraints and marketing mandates of the corporation and "free" IMAP is really not a support priority.

But I'd like to leave my 2 cents here: As desktop + netbook/laptop combinations are becoming ubiquitous, more people need a better way to keep their mail synchronized. Web apps are great inasmuch as you have only one account, but for the multiple account/server warriors IMAP is the only game in town (unless Microsoft starts giving away Exchange servers) and I, for one, have completely switched to Thunderbird and am switching 95% of my clients to it as well.

Additionally, I find it very hard to swallow the cost of Microsoft Office when I am forced with a product that is effectively unusable (Outlook. When my Office 2007 becomes "old" I will strongly consider switching to Open Office (which many of my clients are already switching to) unless there are effective improvements to Outlook and/or a change in the SKUs offered so that I may purchase the Office Suite without the red herring that Outlook is.

IMAP is Still garbage in 2010. Has this even been properly tested?? Slow, freezes, nonsense.

After using Outlook 2010 with multiple email POP3 accounts without any problems at all, I finally decided to change them to IMAP accounts. What an extremely poor experience. The delays are ridiculous.  Sending or deleting emails takes forever. Is there anyone that can help configure the IMAP folders in a way that improves the performance? I know that it is possible, as my iPhone, iPad and my Macbook, all use IMAP for my email accounts, and it functions very smoothly and without any noticeable delays.

This Outlook 2010 I personally think is rubbish!. I've been trying to use it since I upgraded 6 months ago and the IMAP connections for outlook are shockingly bad! I use mobile me and GMAil and they are all really slow - outlook always crashes and I have to restart!

I've moved to thunderbird by Mozilla - unless anyone has some comments that might help me sort the problem out.

I set up with 993 port and SMTP port 587 as suggested by google and mobileme

I'm really disappointed in Microsoft's support of IMAP in Outlook 2010.  Most everyone now has multiple email accounts, particularly mobile ones, for whilch IMAP is almost required.   For example, I have a functioning exchange server acct, but when I try to create two different IMAP accounts to other email services I cannot select the pst file associated with those accounts.  This means you cannot point the newly create IMAP accounts to existing pst files.  I've been on the net and tried every method to make this work, including creating an POP and IMAP account for one service and copying the emails from the POP to the IMAP, which works until I want to remove the POP account, which then removes the IMAP account.  I've spend an inordinate amount of time on this and cannot believe Microsoft did not test for such a likely scenario before they released the product.

Hi I can not get my aol account to appear in my outlook , it is running through IMAP but that doesn't seem to work.

Wow, guys. IMAP is still slooooow. It does work better than in the last version, but it is still very painful to mark messages unread and to bulk delete multiple messages. Thunderbird/Postbox are able to it in the blink of an eye. Why hasn't this issue been addressed? Surely there are a lot of complaints here about it.

I would like to have some of whatever you're smoking, it must be really good. I don't know about your world, but in mine teaching Outlook 2010 to use IMAP is like teaching a chimpanzee to speak Latin. It took me half an hour to figure out what settings needed to go where, and I still can't get it to see any of my IMAP folders besides Inbox. I got disgusted and downloaded a copy of Thunderbird, told it my account name, and it immediately doped out most of the email server's configuration by itself. There were a couple of things I had to change by hand, but that's OK--Tbird figured out a couple of things I didn't know myself, so we're even. And all the IMAP folders appeared instantly. No cajoling, no querying, no Googling "why can't Outlook see my IMAP folders?"

Outlook costs $70-$140, is a pain to install, and can't really use IMAP. Thunderbird is free, sets up in five minutes or less, and handles IMAP like a pro. No contest.

To be fair, Outlook integrates well with Office 2010. But it's so broken it just counts as another reason to find an alternative for Office.