Outlook 2010: Gmail IMAP Support

By Nakodari | Published: November 20, 2009

Many people are looking forward to Outlook 2010, but few are reluctant to give it a try. The reason keeping them back is IMAP support for Gmail and other web services. In Outlook 2007 if you try setting up Gmail IMAP, you will find it to be clunky, slow, or in other words useless.

For those who don’t know IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is far better than POP since it allows users to download all their emails as if they are residing locally. In other words, unlike POP, IMAP is a two way communication. If you move your email to a folder titled ‘Work’ in Outlook 2010, you will it find the email in Work folder when you login directly to Gmail via a web browser.

Microsoft has made it dead-simple to add a new account in Outlook 2010 and when you add a Gmail account, Windows Live account, or any other account, IMAP is automatically configured.

Note: IMAP must be enabled from inside Gmail, Windows Live, or any other web service otherwise it won’t work. Update: As one commenter points out below, Windows Live Mail doesn’t support IMAP.

outlook 2010 imap

So how is IMAP in Outlook 2010? After using it for a day, moving and organizing my Gmail emails, I have to say that it works seamlessly without any problems. If you are one of those users who ditched Outlook 2007 due to lack of IMAP support, Outlook 2010 will steal you back.

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  • ravi16aug
    I see some problems with your article. First, the performance of IMAP on 2010 is only marginally better than that on 2007 SP2. Second, the protocol used by Windows Live is not IMAP, its called deltasync. And it is achieved by using the Outlook connector. In case you dont want to use the connector, then you have POP3 as the only choice.
  • Nakodari
    For me IMAP is working fine. I am able to move mails to various folders and perform other operations without any problem. And yes, there are some times when Outlook 2010 would hang up but this occurs very rarely when compared with Outlook 2007.
  • Chad
    Nakodari, I agree with you completely. The added functionality of Outlook 2010 over the Thunderbird client I was using is shocking. The conversation features make me wonder how I ever kept my emails organized before.

    I was also shocked at how easy setting up gmail imap was. Like you said, it just did it! No changing tls settings and port mapping anymore.

    But, I wanted to ask you now that you've been using it for a month or so, are you having trouble with Outlook 2010 saving all sent messages to the sent folder?

    Every once in a awhile, it will not save a sent message to the sent folder. But when I log in to Gmail, it's right there in the sent folder. Obviously this creates problems if you have to log in to your actual account to see if your message sent or not. I can't re-create the problem reliably, it seems quite random.

    Sometimes it saves it, sometimes it doesn't. But the message is always sent to the recipient regardless. Any ideas?
  • I too would love to hear an update on this post since you wrote it. I have used OUtlook with IMap to Google Apps gMail since Office 2005. Office 2007 was a real improvement and SP 2 helped a bit more. I still feel its a bit clunky. My chief concern is that Outlook 2007 SP2 doesn't keep content synced in real-time. If I move emails from the inbox to an Outlook folder, the whole email doesn't move/download from gMail until I try to access that email (or its attachements) at a later time. I then have to wait for the download. I'm wondering if that is fixed in Office 2010.

    The other, obvious, problem is the whole Label vs. Folder debate. I much prefer folders but am living with the Label equivalents in Google Apps gmail. Problem is they are functionally useless to me in google because I have literally thousands of nested sub-folders supporting my client base. Folders are still useful to me in Outlook 2007 but the Labels in Gmail are useless and impossible to navigate through when there are so many.

    Thanks for any update you might be able to give.

    ...Dale
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