Force Outlook 2007 to Download Complete IMAP Items
After writing about how to setup Gmail IMAP in Outlook, I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from users wondering how to make Outlook download the entire message instead of just the headers. You’ll have to navigate through a convoluted set of menus, but it’s really quite simple.
Note: If you have 500 million messages in your Gmail inbox folder you should think strongly about not enabling this, because it will take simply forever to download them all.
From the Tools menu choose Send/Receive, Send/Receive Settings, and then Define Send/Receive Groups. Or you could just hit the Ctrl+Alt+S shortcut key instead of navigating the ridiculous menus.
This will bring up the Send/Receive Groups dialog, which has some interesting options that aren’t relevant here. Choose the Edit button instead.
Almost there… now click on your IMAP account in the left-hand pane, and then under the Receive Mail Items section choose either to “Download complete items” or “Use the custom behavior defined below”.
Personally I’d recommend using the custom behavior and only downloading complete items for the Inbox folder. You’ll have to select “Download complete item including attachments” to flip the switch.
Daily Email Updates
You can get our how-to articles in your inbox each day for free. Just enter your name and email below:
I have outlook 2002. These options are there but greyed out. Any ideas? Brad
Thanks for the great writeup. Wouldn’t choosing to download complete items including attachments allow to have a “carbon copy” of your gmail message store in Outlook? Is your reason for not recommending this related to PST file size? If you would explain further I would appreciate it.
Thank you for publishing a wonderful blog – I’m one of your feedburner stats.
Rich
I cannot get outlook 2007 to work with Imap!! it just comes up with the server has recieved an unrecognised certificate or some such ref. Also it say the certificate was for pop when all my settings are for imap both in outlook and on the gmail server. I have my own domain email which I used also to set up but it just wont work any ideas? thanks…
Thx, just what I needed
thanks! this is just what i needed. i would have never found it
can you help?
i have IMAP enabled in gmail, so that i can sync with outlook 07
when i send an email from outlook, it DOES show up in SENT folder in Gmail. it works fine.
but, when i send an email from GMAIL, it DOES NOT show up in the sent folder of Outlook.
how do i fix ?
thanks for the help !!
Thanks for the help!
A more useful behavior would be to download full messages only for the past 3 days (for example). Any change such time-based scheduling is available?
I am running Outlook 2007 off of XP. My “Send/Receive” box is different and I don’t have an option for custom settings.
Any ideas?
I really need this to work and to get my gmail messages from the past 2 months onto Outlook.
Is there a way to only import select emails? Can I filter the messages?
I have all my work emails from a corporate account forwarded to my gmail address. Can I specify the messages that come in under a different email address be imported to Outlook only?
Rob,
I suspect that you are not finding the settings options (see above); it is not part of the send/receive dialogue, but part of the menuing options (which you may have moved around). If you have a corporately managed distribution of Outlook 2007, it is possible that your IT management disabled it.
There do not seem to be ways to limit the import, but you can use filters on the messages (filters run “post import.”
Good luck!
Ken Thomas
Horton Group
The Drupal Communications Experts
Hi..great info but I have an odd problem that I have looked everywhere for an answer to but cannot find. I have my gmail coming through my xp and for some reason, I cannot get my sent messages to download. I cannot go back and look at my sents and I need to be able to do this..Any ideas??
Thanks
W
oops…sorry…I mean through my outlook..
W
Wendy,
if i understand your question correctly, the above steps from the Geek will solve your problem if you go to include your “sent items” folder also to fully download on Send/Receive.
Otherwise, if your sent items folder shows only the headers of your sent mail, which is my case, you can do these:
- highlight all the ones you want to fully download and right click/select for downloading, which will mean next time you do sync with your server, these items will download.
- from your mail option settings, mark your option to keep copies of your sent items in your local outlook. this will mean you will have a copy of your sent mail in the gmail sent itmes folder as headers, and a full copy in your outlook sent itmes folder. this is also what i do, as i need the sent mail to stay in my computer.
my question:
every time i click on the imap Inbox it syncs the folder with the server if i am online and this locks my outlook 07 until it is finished syncing. same happens if i receive a new e-mail while i am in the Inbox. is it possible to make this manual? (i occasionally click on Send/Receive to manually download and send all messages according to my choices in the options that Geek put up on top.
cheers
inanc
“Or you could just hit the Ctrl+Alt+S shortcut key instead of navigating the ridiculous menus.” – hah hah hah I like your style. Yes it is rather ridiculous that IT professionals need Google’s/your help to find such a basic option. But the location kind of makes sense… when you know…
PS: It worked thanks.
Thanks for the advice, mostly everything is working fine however:
When I read email on my blackberry I notice that the email changes to read on my Gmail account, but still shows as unread on Outlook. Deletions work fine on both Gmail and outlook in realtime, any suggestions as this is a major irritant.
Thanks
Thanks for your lovely tip. It was really benefecial.
hi,
thanks this really helped me!
but i still have one question (i’m new to outlook, used thunderbird before): how can I donwload the content (and attachments) for all my old mails in the inbox? i need this for the filter/search mail-functionality to work…
thanks
rene
This actually didn’t work for me. I have 103,000+ emails in Gmail going back to 1999.
When I select the “All Mail” folder in the hierarchy, and tell it to download all of the messages + attachments, it just downloads headers… every time.
I have to go to each folder, Select All, and then right-click and choose “Mark to download message(s)”, and then go to Send/Receive in the toolbar, and choose “Process marked headers in this folder”.
Long, and VERY tedious… when it shouldn’t be this difficult.
Thank You!!! That was driving me BONKERS! I love the internet!!!
I’m using Outlook 2003 and when I go to the screen, my options to ‘download headers only’ or ‘download complete items including attachments’ are both greyed out and I can’t select either. Any ideas?
exactly the answers that I needed per my google search. You are the Five Star Geeks!
I just configured my microsoft outlook 2007 with my gmail account. The test message shows that my gmail account has received the test message. However, I can’t receive mails through outlook, but instead, can only send mail out from outlook. What do I need to do?
This does not work for me.