"Your IMAP server wants to alert you to the following: cannot move folder into itself"

[Bill Colonna]

Just found this forum and hopefully the experts can help me out with this very annoying message that pops up 50 times a day-

"Your IMAP server wants to alert you to the following: cannot move folder into itself"

Any idea how to stop the message ? I am a computer user, but not an expert at all.

Thanks

Bill

 

[Diane Poremsky]

it sounds like you tried to move a folder and drop it on itself.

Do you have calendar, contacts, and tasks in the 'this computer only' folders in the imap data file? if yes, export them to a pst file. If you are using a pst for the calendar and contacts, then you are ok.

Then close outlook and go to %localappdata%\microsoft\outlook and delete the imap data file. (Type or paste that path into the address bar of windows explorer and press Enter.) This will rebuild the data file and will fix the errors.

 

[Joe Maimone]

Is there anyone who can go into more detail on how to eliminate this annoying message? I'm not even half way computer literate. The message from Diane is confusing.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

The short version: You need to delete the ost file and let outlook re-sync it.

But... if you have calendar and contacts folders labeled 'this computer only', you'll lose the contents of those folders when you delete the ost file if you don't export them first. (or move them into a pst that is set as default)

if you don't have 'this computer only folders' or they are empty, start at around the 2:27 point in the video.

See if this video helps -