Hello,
I have used Outlook and Entourage for many, many years. For the past few years, every few months, Outlook will re-download all email from several of my POP accounts. This is very time consuming to fix because I have many filters and need to manually find
the duplicates. Recently, Outlook would repeatedly re-download all email for some of my POP accounts. This resulted in 3, 4 or even 5 duplicates per message. To make matters worse, Outlook does not allow POP email to removed from the server after X number
of days. Entourage had that feature and I don't understand why Outlook doesn't have the feature. Certainly I can choose to immediately remove POP email from the server which avoids re-downloading duplicate emails, but recently this strategy caused me to lose
emails. My hard disk crashed and my most recent backup was 4 days old. All POP email that was downloaded from the server during those four days was permanently lost! This would not have happened with Entourage because it allowed me to remove email from the
server after a certain number of days. I usually picked 30 days, I think. Of course, if I read the POP account from two devices, like a Mac and an iPhone, then I need to keep it on the server.
I understand that IMAP is better. I have 15+ email accounts. Five of them are IMAP and they work great. I use POP for high volume list subscriptions or for accounts I never read from my iPhone.
I'm currently using Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011, version 14.4.1, released April 8, 2014. In the release notes the second fix listed is:
• Improves the ability to recover from certain network errors when you connect by using POP in Outlook for Mac
This update fixes an issue that causes Outlook for Mac to re-download the contents of the inbox for POP accounts for certain connection errors.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2939132/en-us
Options for using POP email accounts with Outlook:
1. Always keep the email on the server. This needs to be done if I read the email from two devices or if I don't want to risk permanently losing the emails. With this approach, I occasionally remove all the email from the server and this can be very time
consuming.
2. Always remove the email on the server. I take this approach for most of my POP accounts. My hard disk is a solid state drive (SDD) and it's crashed twice in the past 2 years. This leads to permanently lose of emails.
3. Somehow get Microsoft to add the "Remove messages after X number of days" feature for POP accounts. I like this option the best, but I don't know how to have a feature request considered. I'll plan to "Send Feedback" from the Help menu on Outlook. I truly
wish that I could file an issue report.
If anyone has suggestions or comments, let me know. Thanks!
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