The New IMAP in Outlook 2013

IMAP is an important protocol for many of Outlook's customers, and we've heard from many of you that Outlook's IMAP support is not at the level of quality that you expect from a product like Outlook. We heard your feedback, and this release we made a significant investment in IMAP.

Here's what you'll see with IMAP in Outlook 2013:

  • Syncing/sending messages is done in the background, so you no longer have to wait for sync to complete in order to use Outlook. General comments about Outlook's performance when using IMAP was the top issue we heard from all of you, and we believe this change will improve the experience quite a bit.
  • New mail notifications are now supported. This was the second most common request we heard.
  • Outlook now recognizes special folders in your mailbox like Trash (in techspeak, the IMAP extension XLIST is now supported)
  • You can choose how much mail to sync and keep locally by telling Outlook to only sync mail that is newer than a certain number of months, such as 3, 6, or 12 months. You can find this setting under "Change account settings":

If you're working in a situation where bandwidth is expensive or otherwise constrained, we recommend using the above new setting to limit the amount of mail you sync to provide the best experience.

However, with all the new improvements we've made to IMAP in Outlook 2013 we were unable to support a few popular features that are used or have been requested by users like you. The two notable features in this list are:

  • Outlook 2013 will no longer support Download Headers Only mode for IMAP
  • And categories will still not be supported for IMAP accounts

We believe the best experience in Outlook is when you have the entire mail downloaded, and that folks who use Download Headers Only would benefit from our new sync offline setting above.

For categories, while this is the third most common request we hear from you, the IMAP protocol itself does not support categories. As a result, we weren't able to engineer a feature that ensures that categories (including the color and name of the category) you assign on one computer are stored on the server and available on all your other computers, or even available on your same computer if you have to recreate your Outlook profile.

We were able to make these improvements to IMAP because you continue to provide feedback to the Outlook team about how to make your experience better. All your questions and comments are not only appreciated, but used to make decisions about how we can improve Outlook in the future. Please keep it coming!

--Allie Bellew, Outlook Program Manager

Office Blogs Comments

Comments: (32) Collapse

  • No "Download Headers Only" mode?  So all that spam I get I will HAVE to download it in full?

  • Just tested this in Gmail and it works very well.

  • So it is safe to say that Microsoft has people that understand IMAP.  NOW ADD SUPPORT TO OUTLOOK.COM :)

  • Allie please complete the IMAP experience by adding the following features (if not already added):

    1) IMAP IDLE support, this was in the previous Outlook versions so make sure it stays in there. Also please add this to the Windows 8 Phone mail client.

    2) Option to automatically subscribe to & offline all imap folders (and check for new folders created during Outlook startup and subscribe/offline if new folders are found). In addition provide option to exclude some folders from this option (such as SPAM or Trash). This will force a local copy download of all email to improve email search from Outlook (or Windows desktop).

    3) IMAP flags (AKA labels). RFC 3501.

    I agree with downloading the whole email due to allowing a more complete search for emails. Actually Outlook is the only Windows email client I found that will index text inside PDF and WORD email attachments one a downloaded local copy. Not even GMail will index text inside those type of attachments and allow for search.

    Add those features and Outlook will have a great IMAP experience.

  • Could you explain the removal of "Sent Items" folder setting? Is it supposed to work with the XLIST feature? Because in Outlook 2013 my sent mail is put into a folder named "Sent Items" instead of the correct IMAP sent items folder of my account.

  • I am not sure why but in Outlook 2013 release preview, when subscribed to Gmail via IMAP, Outlook doesn't automatically download anything until I click on the Gmail account. Is this the normal behavior? If yes, this means that I don't have auto-check for new mail in IMAP accounts, which is... strange and uncomfortable, to say the least.

  • "Outlook 2013 will no longer support Download Headers Only mode for IMAP"

    This is huge disappointment. If I have a large mailbox (especially corporate one, then I'll have to download it all to be able to see old messages? And what if it's running on mobile device and is connecting to Internet using 3G?

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  • "Outlook 2013 will no longer support Download Headers Only mode for IMAP" will make me never use Outlook higher then 2010 or even get back to clumsy but totally adjustable Thunderbird

  • yeah, this is a very strange and stupid surprise!

  • There is a serious problem with Outlook's new IMAP, which has not gotten the attention it deserves since being reported nearly four months ago!

    Outlook 2013 IMAP messages keep re-appearing after deletion or move

    See these threads:

    answers.microsoft.com/.../5d473f53-18bf-42c9-ae11-16cd74c8cbfe

    social.technet.microsoft.com/.../ba9c1b73-e55b-4903-a9c1-fc9e4cd28c65

  • So there's a big problem with Outlook 2013's IMAP--and there is a big problem with this blog engine.  My URLs, pasted in the previous post, get mangled on paste and mangled further when copying them to use in a browser, since actual hyperlinks are not permitted.  No wonder Microsoft is losing market share.

    Extra dashes are inserted throughout the links on paste and even more upon copy.  What in the world?!  Earth to Microsoft.  Come in, Microsoft.

  • Search the Microsoft "Community" for the string below:

    http://answers.microsoft.com/

    Outlook 2013 IMAP messages keep re-appearing after deletion or move

  • Wow, go ahead and search the Web for:

    Outlook 2013 IMAP Problems

    It's unbelievable that Allie Bellew spent time bragging about the "new" IMAP when it's so broken.  I'd add a bunch of links, but they'll just get mangled.

    Bottom line: If you use IMAP, avoid Outlook 2013 like the plague!

  • Having lots of IMAP-related problems here as well.

    Sometimes I click "delete" but the message doesn't go away. Very intermittent.

    Mailbox doesn't update for an hour, when I've set Outlook to check every 15 minutes.

    Outlook has crashed multiple times as well.

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