Outlook/Google Configuration

[david.delano]

Over the last few months, my email requirements have changed dramatically. I cannot seem to get things configured like I need, and I've tried all the combinations of settings I can come up with. In searching for a solution, I found this site, and you really seem to know your stuff, so hoping you can help out.

I have a gmail account and an ISP account. I used the ISP address as my email address, only exposing the gmail address when I have to. I POP the ISP account to gmail. All of this is fine and good, except....

I am running Outlook 2010 on Win8 (not necessarily important, as I couldn't get it to work on Win7, either). I have a Win8 tablet, an Android tablet, and an Android phone. I want Outlook to be the final resting place for my emails, and would rather not leave them on Google for any length of time. But, I also want to be able to read gmaol from the other devices (and I use the Win8 Mail app on my PC), and want to keep a few days worth of email on the server.

I have my ISP account set up as POP (only protocol supported), but only send when syncing (though I've noticed a couple receives sometime sneak through - not a deal killer).

I have my gmail account set up as POP. I have it set to leave 14 days on the server, and remove deleted mail when the Trash is emptied. When I sync, it does receive only, though that is probably a moot point.

On gmail, I've tried "keep on server", which keeps everything, and delete, which deletes everything. Nothing seems to cause gmail to do what the Outlook setting says, and keep the last 14 days on the server, and purge after that. I also seem to be getting messages that I have deleted on one of the other devices POPed down and have to delete them all over again.

I've also tried setting the gmail account as IMAP, then archiving to the main Inbox, but everything seems to ignore this archiving.

Anything that will work????

David

 

[david.delano]

How does one get attention on this forum??

 

[Diane Poremsky]

post on a week when I'm not away at meetings with Microsoft.

So you want gmail to honor the leave on settings in outlook? Gmail is not good at honoring the pop3 delete command outlook sends but gmail settings will let you delete imap when you purge in outlook, they are removed from online too. I would probably use the pop3 setting to delete from gmail - it should move the item to gmail's trash and removes it after 30 days.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#settings/fwdandpop

 

[david.delano]

post on a week when I'm not away at meetings with Microsoft.

So you want gmail to honor the leave on settings in outlook? Gmail is not good at honoring the pop3 delete command outlook sends but gmail settings will let you delete imap when you purge in outlook, they are removed from online too. I would probably use the pop3 setting to delete from gmail - it should move the item to gmail's trash and removes it after 30 days.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#settings/fwdandpop

Thanks, Diane. Sorry, my first post, and I see answers all over the place, and no one had even looked at my question!

The information that Gmail doesn't honor the POP3 delete makes sense out of this. What you are stating is what I'm currently doing, and just running Outlook every now and then, instead of constantly. But, what I really want is to leave 7 days of email on Gmail, so that I have access to it on the go. Even a couple days would be nice.

So.....can I use my .pst as storage and to get to older emails (though that shoots all my rule sorting to pieces), then read the current Gmail via IMAP, and archive anything over 7 days old to the .pst? I can't seem to get that to work. Interesting that all the rules run correctly when I receive using IMAP, and the filtered emails are saved off to the .pst folders, but the archive doesn't want to move anything. I don't see a way to create a time related rule, though that's what archiving really is. This is not ideal, but I could live with it, though some of the emails I want to keep on Gmail are the ones that are also filtered by the rules settings.

Just looking for suggestions (other than trying something other than Outlook) to make my email life easier. (I'd try something else, but I'm not convinced it would behave any better with Gmail.)

David

 

[david.delano]

Diane -

I now understand that Google has an incomplete implementation of POP3, and thus is ignoring everything that Outlook is telling it. Thus, any settings on the Outlook side for POP3 are getting ignored.

I thought I found a way to fix the aging message issue on the Gmail side. I set up a filter to mark old messages with a label as a test. When the filter is set up, it runs well, though I had to turn off conversation mode. However, it appears this is not going to be an automatic fix. The filter is triggered by new messages, but it "forgets" the setting to apply the filter to other messages.

So, now I'm back to what I thought would work originally. I had started trying this on Win7, before updating to Win8 and having to recreate all my Outlook setup after reinstalling it. My question to you is, does auto-archiving work for IMAP accounts? It seems not to.

What I would like to be able to do is set up the Gmail account as IMAP. I'd turn off all receiving on the .pst account, and just use it to send to my ISP account. All receiving would be via the IMAP account, as if I was reading it from one of my devices (and frankly, I can use the Win8 email to read my email, though it leaves a LOT to be desired). Then I can set up auto-archiving for the IMAP account to move messages older than X to the .pst. One side effect is that any filters I have set up would have to be modified to run from the IMAP account, since they are triggered when new email arrives. [Side note - I had this part working. Outlook forced me to make a new set of filters for the IMAP account, and I had to modify them to move the message to the .pst sub-folder, as it would try to find the folder on IMAP otherwise. I suppose I could filter then to an IMAP folder, then archive, except I don't think Gmail would support that, since it doesn't have sub-folders.] When the filters are applied, and the messages moved to the .pst, the messages disappear on the IMAP side, and Gmail, so something is working right. I was to the point of trying to get the auto-archive to work when I updated to Win8. I tried setting a rule to auto-archive the IMAP inbox daily, moving messages older than 14 days to the .pst file (which is then auto-archived, but with older aging). I don't recall getting that to work, so is it possible????

I leave it at that question for now, since if that will work, I can live with it as the solution.

David

 

[david.delano]

I think I confused myself somewhere along the way.

I really don't need to archive the IMAP email to the .pst file. I can POP it down, instead, to do the archiving. Though, the disadvantage of doing that is, I'd have to double delete messages once they are POPed. The advantage to only archiving to the .pst after it has aged is that all the manual processing of reading/deleting would already be accomplished. I would assume, though could be wrong, that the archiving would also preserve the "read" status (currently I also have to re-read the messages after they are POPed). The real issue is to find an automated way to delete email older than x off of Gmail.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

If you are going to archive it, I think archiving IMAP will be better as it will get the message state (reply, forward) but I do think you are overthinking it and making t more complicated than it needs to be. Or not... it could be my jet lag. <g
Goal: Remove all mail from gmail servers as the messages age.

Solution: Use IMAP on all computers to give you a unified view on all devices. Archive IMAP to a pst, configure Outlook / Gmail settings to move deleted items to trash, which is emptied by google as it ages. If it works, this will be the best, most automated method. (I'm waiting for autoarchive to run on my test machine to see if it works as it can be fussy with imap accounts.)

Not sure if this might fix the archiving problem -

AutoArchiving by Received Date in Outlook - Slipstick Systems

 

[david.delano]

I agree this is the best solution.

Thanks for the link. Everything else I've read says that the modified date issue is why IMAP can't be archived, and that it can't be sync'ed. The info at this link says there is a fix so that the received date can be used instead, so it should then work.

I've run across another solution that uses a Google App script. However, I am not familiar with using that sort of solution, and it also sounds like the user proposing the solution doesn't use Outlook, or other accumulating solution. I'd rather stick with letting Outlook control the situation as much as possible. I'll give the info at the link a try, too, and see if it works.

David

 

[Diane Poremsky]

I'm not familiar with a google app script so i can't say if that would be a better solution than outlook, but i think doing it in outlook gives you more control.

 

[david.delano]

This is for the AutoArchiving link instructions.....I downloaded the hotfix, but when I went to apply it, it said I already had the patch, so it must have been added to an update at some point. I DID have to make the registry change.

I think I have everything set up. I'd like to see if it does everything automatically, and the shortest interval I could set up was 1 week, so I'll let it run it's course.

Question - will the autoarchived emails appear to be incoming messages to the default .pst, and thus the rules applied? (Otherwise I'll create rules for the Gmail IMAP .pst)

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Question - will the autoarchived emails appear to be incoming messages to the default .pst, and thus the rules applied? (Otherwise I'll create rules for the Gmail IMAP .pst)

No. AutoArchive just moves messages that meet the condition from pst to the other. It will keep them in the same folder as they were in - just in the archive pst.

(I set my test profile to autoarchive I daily and it doesn't appear to be running at all.... and then it made me out to be a liar immediately after i said that. It works just fine on the imap folders. I will need to see what google does with the messages on its side. )

 

[david.delano]

Today is the first day that there was email old enough on Gmail to archive. It looks like the archive works.

However, I appear to be saving some duplicate emails, but not all of the email was duplicated. Any ideas? Is the ALL mailbox getting filtered, too, even though I don't have archiving set for that folder?

And, I still have the rules question above. I didn't have enough email archived to tell if they were filtered. Some weren't, but they are also emails that the rules don't always catch (the rules need some work). I might be able to answer this tomorrow.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Autoarchiving applies to all folders unless you disable it per folder on the Properties > AutoArchive tab. Being the lazy sort with way too many folders, I've often set a really high (like 5 yrs) archive time, applied to all folders then set the ones I wanted to archive to have lower periods.

 

[david.delano]

I have set the Do Not Archive setting for the folders I don't want archived. However, for Gmail, I've found a couple, including the Sent folder, that I had NOT turned the archive off. I am not subscribed to the All folder, so that can't be why I might be getting duplicates. I'll check in the morning to see what was archived, and if there are any duplicates.

I misstated above....you can archive based on Days. But, 1 Week seem to be about right for now.

 

[david.delano]

Today archived relatively well. There were around 20 messages to age out. There were three duplicates. I don't see a pattern in the duplicates, so I'll just have to keep an eye on them. One thing that is a bit peculiar....the duplicate is slightly larger in size. I can open both messages, and see no differences, but they are in html, so difficult to tell what could have been added to the duplicate.

When the archived messages are saved to the main .pst folder, they are not seen as "new" messages, so no rules are run.

So, I think I've answered all of my own questions! The main thing to take away from this thread is the registry edit that causes Outlook to archive based on received time/date rather than modified. The modified date archiving is what was keeping an IMAP folder from being archived the way one would think/want it to be archived.

So, now is there a way to get the filters to be run after an archive?? I can run them manually every now and then, but to make this really useful, they really need to run automatically. I'd like to NOT use Outlook for accessing current emails, only for looking up older emails. Thus, the more automated, the better.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Outlook needs to be open... but you could use VBA to run the rules. I trigger macros with reminders, so if you use Outlook for calendar and tasks, this would work.

OutlookCode.com :: OL2007: Run all rules against inbox

Sample macro triggered by a reminder - Enable or disable Outlook rules using VBA - Slipstick Systems - Slipstick Systems

 

[david.delano]

I've looked into a little bit of VBA programming for Outlook (trying to create a calendar event from Excel) but not anything directly. Outlook would be open, as autoarchive would be running. Where do I put this script to run it? Can the autoarchive trigger it?

I have NO duplicates today, so whatever was causing it has been taken care of.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

The script would go in outlook. AutoArchive can't kick it off, but reminders or new mail could trigger it.

 

[david.delano]

Ok, where do I start? How do I implement a VBA script in Outlook? Just get me going in the right direction!

 

[Diane Poremsky]

File, Options, Trust Center - Set Macro Security to low / allow all macros to run.

Alt+F11 to open the macro editor. Expand project1 to locate ThisOutlookSession, paste the code into the macro window. Press the run button to test.