Categorizing IMAP Email?

[Guest]

I'm using an IMAP folder to access my school email account in the Outlook
2007 beta. However, when I'm in this folder my toolbar loses the buttons for
categorizing email by colour and adding flags.

Is this intentional? How can I take advantage of this new colour coding
feature?

Thanks for your help!
Eric

 

[Patrick Schmid]

It is intentional as the IMAP protocol does not support color
categories. It's a limitation of IMAP, not Outlook.

Patrick Schmid

 

[Guest]

Hmm.. this is interesting. I (and I am by far an expert) would have thought
that categorizing email was entirely a function of the Outlook software, and
doesn't depend on the email server at all.

Alas... c'est la vie. Intentional or not I've found that I can assign
categories to emails if I create a shortcut key for a category and use that
on my IMAP account.

Thanks!

 

[Patrick Schmid]

The limitation is that IMAP emails are stored on the server. So anything
that Outlook wants to save for a particular email, also needs to be
saved on the server. Otherwise, if you accessed your IMAP account from a
different computer, that information wouldn't be there. Hence no
categories.
Can you explain about that shortcut key?

Patrick Schmid

 

[Patrick Schmid]

I found out more about this. This functionality will be present in the
final version of Outlook 2007. However, as I said before, you will lose
any categories you assigned if you open your IMAP account from a
different computer, or if for any reason you need to rebuild the local
copy of your IMAP account (the PST file created by Outlook for the IMAP
account). You are better off moving the emails to a regular PST file and
assigning categories to them there. In addition, Microsoft might remove
this functionality in Office 2007 service packs or in future Office
releases.

Patrick Schmid