Outlook - alternatives to Rules / Junk?

[Richard Flack]

Ive been told by MS that Outlook 2013 Rules dont work right with IMAP. (That is certainly not inconsistent with my experience migrating form Outlook 2007).
Im trying to manage my Bulk Mailings (ie 'spam' that I actually want to keep, at least for limited time periods).

Are there reliable add-ins that do this? That work with IMAP Ok? That can work within a moderate sized mail file (approx 5 GB) and a largeish inbox (right now sitting at 17k msgs thanks to sync moving back all the msgs that Rules had hived off to multiple other folders, archives etc - it SHOULD be around 6k).

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Rules are buggy with imap in all versions of outlook - they don't run until the entire message is downloaded and with imap, it's usually headers first, then bodies, and this can interfere with the rules processing. It's a little better in 2013, but not much IMHO.

Try auto-mate - I don't know how it is with imap, but it can run rules after messages are downloaded (so should be fine). It has a free trial so you can see if it meets your needs.

 

[Richard Flack]

Thanks. And I think youve just explained why some msgs seem to sit for a while with 0 size which then seems to get corrected later.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Yeah, it's probably getting the header then comes back and adds the body - POP3 gets the full message in one swoop.

 

[Richard Flack]

hmmm... that kind of complexity makes me nervous (additional opportunities for failure) and I do wonder if its worth it. I assume the big brains analysed it (distribution of msg sizes and numbers msgs / folder or mailbox) and decided it is worth the two bites at the cherry.

Pardon my ignorance, but it seems that less attention is paid to IMAP than Pop; which seems curious in a multi-device world (which it has been for a number of years now).

 

[Diane Poremsky]

That how imap has always worked - its default was to get headers only.

It was originally (years and years ago) most popular at universities and most home users used POP3 (probably because most ISPs limited mailbox sizes and IMAP is server based). For that reason, less attention was paid to it in Outlook until recent years. Thanks to the popularity of smartphones and devices, it's making a comeback - at one time (circa 2000 timeframe) , it had something like 7% usage rate. I don't know what it is now, but I'm confident it's not 7%.

I remember my first ISP email account - probably 500 MB max quota and pop3 only.