Member Avatar for JonathanM

Hi,

At my office we have 3 Windows PC's running XP Pro sp2 and Office Pro 2003. Most of the office uses Macs so that is what I am used to supporting. Our email is on a POP3/IMAP Linux server. We do not use Exchange or AD or push out any kind of GPO.

When I set up the PC employees with their IMAP account using Outlook 2003 it won't save sent emails in the IMAP sent mail folder, even though I subscribed to it and it is visible in the folder pane. The sent emails are saved in the pst folder. I haven't been able to find any setting to change this.

As an add on question, is there a way to remove the pst file completely? There's no reason for the file to be there and in earlier versions of Outlook the file wasn't automatically created. I tried to remove the file from the local folders path but it reappeared when I restarted Outlook.

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Member Avatar for ptetreau

Saving your Sent Items in a local folder is a "feature" of Outlook with an IMAP account, and so is saving Deleted Items there. With these two requirements, you will not be able to remove the PST file from that account.

- Phil

Hi,

At my office we have 3 Windows PC's running XP Pro sp2 and Office Pro 2003. Most of the office uses Macs so that is what I am used to supporting. Our email is on a POP3/IMAP Linux server. We do not use Exchange or AD or push out any kind of GPO.

When I set up the PC employees with their IMAP account using Outlook 2003 it won't save sent emails in the IMAP sent mail folder, even though I subscribed to it and it is visible in the folder pane. The sent emails are saved in the pst folder. I haven't been able to find any setting to change this.

As an add on question, is there a way to remove the pst file completely? There's no reason for the file to be there and in earlier versions of Outlook the file wasn't automatically created. I tried to remove the file from the local folders path but it reappeared when I restarted Outlook.

Member Avatar for JonathanM

A feature? Doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of IMAP? The PST is a local file so it can't be viewed by these employees when they are logged in to webmail at home.

Saving your Sent Items in a local folder is a "feature" of Outlook with an IMAP account, and so is saving Deleted Items there. With these two requirements, you will not be able to remove the PST file from that account.

- Phil

Member Avatar for ptetreau

Microsoft is not as interested as it might like us to think in actually following existing standards, and they support IMAP with Outlook almost as an afterthought. They can say "We handle industry standard POP3 and IMAP4", but you and I know enough to be skeptical.

To be fair, Eudora, one of the first popular clients to introduce IMAP capability, doesn't support server-based Sent mailboxes, even now after a number of major revisions. They are more interested in adding features like emoticons, apparently.

I recommend Thunderbird as an IMAP client. I guess you need to go Open Source if you really want to maintain your "standards". -Phil

Member Avatar for JonathanM

I just have a hard time believing that Outlook doesn't have a preference to map outgoing emails to the IMAP sent items folder. The Mac version - Entourage - has this when set up as IMAP. It must be something I'm missing but I've gone through every preference I can find.

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