I've never used Outlook because I hate it, and today I was reminded exactly why I hate it. (I've always used Eudora in the past, and when that ended -about 10 years ago- Thunderbird)

Today a coworker of mine asked me if I could help with an email problem. Turned out his provider sent him a mail saying they wouldn't support POP3 anymore, and he had to switch to IMAP. He didn't know how to do this so he asked me. He uses Outlook 2016.

I quickly found out that it's not a simple matter of flipping a switch. It seems once an account was set up as POP3, you cannot switch it to IMAP.

So I created a new account with his exact same data, but as an IMAP. Then I drag and dropped all his POP3 email into the IMAP Inbox folder. The POP3 folders were now empty, so then I went into the account setup and deleted the POP3 account. This went fine, and the IMAP account also works perfectly.

There's just one thing: the old folder and inbox of the POP3 account is still there in the tree view to the left of the screen. Why hasn't it been deleted with the account (which is effectively gone)? Even worse, there seems to be no way of deleting it! Does anybody know how I can get rid of this old entry? It's probably something stupid, but I can't seem to find it.

Thanks!

Every day I am increasingly convinced that Outlook and Exchange exist solely for the purpose of ensuring job security for existing employees of large IT and support departments.

You can't delete it.

Outlook needs a local PST for storing everything other than the email. IMAP doesn't support contacts or calendars, so that information gets stored in a personal PST file.

I would have gone through the same process you did, though I would have copied the emails, closed the old POP PST and stored it somewhere in the Documents folder so I'd have a backup. Those transfers to IMAP can be tricky and it's good to have a backup.

Also, going forward, your coworker should regularly back up those emails from the IMAP account. I've had occasions where my clients didn't have access to an IMAP account anymore, but the OST (file format used for IMAP and Exchange accounts) was still on their computer. I can't stress what a PITA it is to recover data from an OST file. It can't simply be loaded into Outlook like a PST file can. You can only convert it, and I've only found expensive third party conversion applications. I eventually bit the bullet and paid almost $100 for an OST converter.

*edit*
Just a little mini rant here in regards to the original question: Outlook 2016 has this obnoxious bug. As I've explained, IMAP doesn't support contacts or calendar so a regular PST file is created to handle that stuff. Now, some of my clients like to use that calendar "peek" feature that embeds their upcoming appointments on the right-hand side of the Mail view in 2016. For some bizarre reason, Microsoft has not made it possible to populate that peek window with anything other than the default calendar. But if your IMAP account is the default mail account, that means the unused calendar associated with that account is your default calendar. So that peek window is useless. I have no idea why they didn't catch this.

You can't delete it? I'll take your word for it (and fully believe it, giving my experience with other MS products), but that sounds awfully strange to me! My coworker doesn't user a calander in Outlook. Not does he use a contacts list or any other feature, apart from the basic mail.

So the only option would be to delete Outlook and re-install it, just to get rid of that entry that is completely useless and takes up space on the screen (ok, not that much, but still...) ? How stupid!

This is another one of these occasions where I'm soooooooo glad I'm using Thunderbird! Combined with my domain on a Google Apps account, this is a golden combination. If I re-install my stuff, all I need to do is re-install Thunderbird, enter my account settings and voila: everything's back. Priceless.

By the way, this sort of simplicity was also the reason I used Eudora for that long: you could simply copy the Eudora folder to a new system, put a link to the eudora.exe in the start menu and everything would work fine. Also priceless... But of course, that was still POP3 (IMAP never worked very well with Eudora).


I agree, that's usually a good idea, but I don't know if my coworker values his mail that much. He already said it wasn't a big deal should be loose all the mail in the process, so I didn't bother to build in a safety net.

Anyway, thanks for the info!!

Meh, I don't think this is that big a deal. It's a single line in the left-hand side of the folders list.

I don't have much of a problem with Outlook, even though I haven't used it in about 12 years. Besides, it has calendaring which Thunderbird doesn't. And much like products from Apple and Google, things work really well if you live within the ecosystem. Office 365 is a much nicer product than I originally thought.

Ok, so it's not a BIG deal, but it's just stupid. I'll stick to my opinion.


Since last year, Thunderbird actually has the Lightning calender (which was an add-on at first) built-in. So there is a calendar now. But besides that, I still use the Google calendar add-on, which creates a tab in Thunderbird which shows my Google calendar as if I would see it in any other browser window. Totally awesome.

I love Thunderbird.

Except Thunderbird doesn't do a bunch of things that Outlook does. For an IMAP only user though it's probably great. Everything's not back with your Thunderbird example I don't think. Where are your contacts stored?

Reinstalling won't help you. You need that local PST with calendar/contacts etc no matter what you do and an IMAP account on its own can't do that.