Outlook – GMail, IMap and Outlook: Speeding it up

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I finally set up Outlook to use GMail and IMAP, but unfortunately, it's extremely slow. The reason, I think for this is because I have 14300 emails in my inbox. And I have no intention to delete them. So, my questions are:

  1. Is there a way to archive old messages, in order to speed things up?
  2. Any other suggestions on how I can speed it up?

Note: It's only really slow when I click on "Send and Receive". The actual synchronization is what takes forever.

Best Answer

To archive old email in Gmail:

  • In the search box type "in:inbox -is:starred before:2008/06/01" where the date is in yyyy/mm/dd format.
  • Press the Select All link. When you press this link, but you have more than a page of results a new link will appear that says "Select all conversations that match this search" - press that
  • In the Action drop down, select Archive.

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Note: you could also create a label "Old" and have all mails older than a set date be named old. Update the date query will keep your Inbox trimmed. By archiving all mail with the "Old" label, you don't have to manually do these steps every time and it's easier to restore/find them.

Read this article to speed up your Outlook, it explains how to speed up Gmail's IMAP integration with Outlook by:

  • only downloading headers from the Spam and Trash folders.
  • adjusting the time that Outlook should wait before checking for new mail

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