Large IMAP email accounts; limited HD space but want to see all email; sync like Thunderbird?

Copper Contributor

My company recently switched to Outlook desktop (from Mozilla Thunderbird) but we're having an issue with managing hard drive space with our email accounts. We all have several large IMAP email accounts (> 20GBs) on our profiles. With the Thunderbird email client, it was easy to view all emails on these accounts without having to sync all email data to each local hard drive. Thunderbird has a great message synchronization feature--see attached screenshot--where it only downloads message headers on the local email profile. This saved big time on disk space and worked well within our organization. Several users have limited hard drive space and I'm trying to figure out how to make all IMAP emails available without having to download all email data to the local hard drive. Is it possible to replicate this Thunderbird (header only) message synchronization setting in Outlook? Can we view all emails in Outlook on these IMAP accounts without having to download all data? Thanks.

2 Replies
It has been a while since I used imap, but I think you can do this by editing the settings within Send/Receive groups.

@Lloyd Adams Thanks. I tried that but the issue seems to be limited search functionality--even if just searching headers--when it's set up for just downloading headers only. I'll keep testing to see if I can just download headers but still have access to all emails and search. Don't need to search the body of emails 99% of the time so fine to not have that cached locally.