Be careful deleting email if you use IMAP.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
IMAP is an email protocol that's used to communicate between email programs like
Microsoft Office Outlook on your desktop, or Thunderbird on your desktop,
or any number of mobile apps on your mobile devices between those
and the master copy of your email at your email service.
So for example,
you might have an Outlook.com account that you can access via the Web,
but you're also able to access it via Outlook on your PC.
Outlook, the program on your PC and Thunder bridge on your PC or on your
mobile devices or any number of other places.
It's this protocol that allows this all to happen kind of transparently.
It keeps everything in sync.
So if you make changes on your mobile
device, they're automatically reflected everywhere else.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that if you make changes
on your device, they get reflected everywhere.
And that includes deleting.
And that causes a lot of people some consternation because they didn't
necessarily expect what they deleted on their PC to be deleted from online.
Now, a quick caveat here, I did mention this earlier,
that the Exchange protocol, when you use your Microsoft Outlook.com
account in another email program like Microsoft Office Outlook is very similar.
They're different protocols, but they're very similar in this regard
in that they keep all of the changes in sync.
So the example that I'll be showing you today is using Outlook.com
and an Outlook.com account open in Microsoft Office Outlook on my desktop.
In fact, here it is.
So on the right hand side I have Microsoft Outlook.com open in Edge.
So I'm actually using a web browser
to view my email account, where I have one message in my inbox.
On the left hand side I have Microsoft Office Outlook,
the program running on my desktop, running on my computer.
It is connected to the same account.
So you'll see there that I have that same
one message in my inbox an example of synchronization.
If I read this message, in fact,
I'll just double click it to open it and then close it.
You'll notice that very quickly online, it also got marked as red.
If online I right click on it and mark it as unread, then within a few seconds it
will also show up as unread in Microsoft Office Outlook on my desktop.
And there it went. The difference being that it went
from normal text to bolded text for the subject and the date.
That's nice, because that means that you can read your email on any of your
connected devices and things like the has it been read?
Status is updated everywhere.
However, what happens if I delete this message?
If I delete this message in my email
program, it goes away, but then within a few seconds over
on the right hand side, it gets removed from the online account as well.
And in fact, if we were to wait long
enough, if we were to empty the Deleted Items folder and wait long
enough, that message would be unrecoverable.
There would be no way to get it back.
So what do you do if you want to save that message?
But maybe you're running into space
limitations with your email account, or maybe there's some other reason
that you don't want it everywhere, but you still want to save it.
Well, what you end up needing to do is
create or use what are called Local folders.
First thing I'm going to do is move this
message back to my inbox so that I can use it as my example.
Again, we have our message in our inbox. It hasn't been read.
It doesn't matter. And you can see that on the right hand
side, it reappeared in the online version of this account.
So what do we do if we want Local folders?
Well, you'll notice
that Microsoft Office Outlook does not show any local folders by default.
Many other email programs have them.
Thunderbird, for example, includes them from the start.
All you need to do in Thunderbird is drag and drop the message into a local folder.
In Microsoft Office Outlook, we need to first create some local folders.
The way we'll do that is here with new more Items outlook data file.
We're creating a place to put this.
Now this happens to be located in Outlook files, which is fine.
It doesn't really matter.
If you want to put it somewhere else, you can.
I'm going to call this local folders.
Hit okay.
And you'll notice then that down below,
outside of the account, is this thing called Local Folders.
If I expand it, there's a couple of default folders that are there.
But what we really want is our own saved email folder.
So I'm going to right click on it, click New folder.
I'll just call it save.
So now I have this saved stuff.
There's nothing here.
If I now go to my inbox in my account
and I drag and drop the message I want to save and place it into Saved stuff,
you'll notice it'll get removed from the online copy within a few seconds.
Now that removed it from the online
account and in fact, it's not even in the Deleted Items folder.
It's gone.
However, we still have a copy.
We have a copy here in Saved Stuff, one of our local folders.
This exists only on my PC.
That means that it's in one and only one place.
That of course means that it's not backed up.
The good news, of course, is that of course I'm backing up this PC.
So every night,
my new Microsoft Office Outlook PST file, which stands for Personal Store,
will get backed up just like every other file on this PC.
But again, this message exists only on this PC.
That's why the folders are called local.
They are local to this PC.
Now, if you have email in, say,
a PST or another account or something like that, you can move it back.
There's nothing that says you can't.
So if you want that message to go back
into your online account once again, all you need to do is click, hold, drag,
and drop to the inbox associated with the account you want it to live in.
It gets copied over, and in a few seconds it shows up
on the right hand side in the online copy that is now available to all of your
mobile devices and other instances of email programs.
I hope that helps explain a little bit
of the mystery between IMAP and Exchange, and why sometimes email that you delete
in one place actually does get deleted from all these other places.
But more importantly, now you have a technique to save the email
you need to save and still be able to remove it from your online account.
Hope it was helpful.
For updates, for comments,
for related links and more, visit askleo.com/147319.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.