Still No Unified Inbox in Outlook 2010!

[imacken]

Unless I'm missing a trick, there is still no unified Inbox in Outlook 2010. In this day and age of most people having multiple email accounts, I find that amazing.
MS have managed to do it excellently in the Mac version of Office 2011 Outlook, so why are we losing out?

 

[pbcopter]

You could try something like this.

Set Up Single Inbox Folder For All Accounts In Outlook 2010

 

[imacken]

Yes, thanks for that. I've seen that before. I didn't try it because it seems to just move mails to another folder which isn't really the same thing.
You only have to look at Apple's mail client on the iPhone or OS X, or Microsoft's own Outlook 2011 for Mac to see how it should be done.
I just don't understand why MS haven't built it into the Windows version of Office yet.

 

[mikedl]

I don't understand, all of my email goes to my singular inbox from the five email accounts I use.

Always has since Outlook for XP. I suppose I'm missing something, I'm sure, regarding the OP's post. On my iPhone, on the other hand, I have to go into each account to read my emails.

 

[imacken]

Tell me how you do it - please!
As far as the iPhone is concerned, then I guess you're not on iOS4, otherwise you would have a unified Inbox.
What I see is this screenshot below

 

[imacken]

I give up.
I tried the new rule method mentioned above. Couldn't get it to work.
The best I seem to be able to achieve is to show all 4 Inboxes in Favorites. At least then, I don't have to expand each account tree to see the Inboxes.
I would still like to know how Mikedl got it to work, though.

 

[pbcopter]

Are all your email accounts POP3?

 

[mikedl]

I didn't do anything special. I've kept my settings for Outlook since Office XP (yeah, I've got email that old I still lug around from version to version). All of my mail goes to my singular inbox except for my Gmail IMAP account which is unchangeable in that aspect. I set up a POP account for Gmail as well so it will show up in my singular inbox and now only use the IMAP account on the computer to delete mail from my iPhone with push.

Have a look at your folder settings as indicated below:

 

[imacken]

Thanks guys.
I have 1 POP and 3 IMAP. Does that make a difference?

 

[mikedl]

I haven't been able to point my IMAP account to the singular inbox. Note there is no folder option available for the IMAP account as there was for the POP accounts:


Outlook creates separate folder sets for IMAP thereby giving you the results you showed earlier.

I would imagine rules are the only way to organize your IMAP accounts into one inbox. I haven't tried do so as it's not necessary for me so I cannot say why rules aren't working for you.

 

[imacken]

Yes, it looks like Outlook is not geared up for IMAP at all. No folder option (as above), no ability to change the default data file, no forwarding rules working,.....
I'm amazed that this new version of Outlook is way behind the Apple offerings, and more importantly, Microsoft's own outlook 2011 for Mac!
Why can't they update their native Windows version? It is, after all, their bread and butter.

 

[imacken]

Just thinking about this, can anyone confirm that these issues I'm having are down the the accounts being IMAP?

 

[imacken]

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

 

[starlyth]

Who knows if anyone is actually going to read this after all this time, but here goes.

The mix of IMAP and POP is the issue. The way Outlook uses IMAP as separate entities does not allow for the concept of a unified inbox. You could set up rules to move new messages from an IMAP account to your local folders, but that's about it.

 

[steppinwolf]

The OP is correct. I believe the Windows Outlook 2010 development team simply failed to provide the important "All Inboxes" feature. As stated, it's available in other email clients these days including the free or built-in iOS Mail and Windows Live Mail (both of which I end up using more than Outlook 2010 partly for this reason).

Solutions that move email from multiple accounts into a single folder/data store just create a mess IMO. Some may prefer it. But what I and (I think) others want is a View (using the SQL database term which is probably what this feature is based on anyway). A View presents multiple data sources in a single result set without modifying the underlying sources. A View is cached in memory upon each use and otherwise doesn't physically exist.

Anything you do to an email (open, reply, flag, delete...) is passed to the source account for handling, so it doesn't matter whether that account is POP, IMAP, MAPI or whatever as long as you have the credentials stored for each. You can navigate to any source Inbox and see the exact same status for an email because that's where the View is getting it's data anyway.

I don't have the Mac version of Outlook, but it sounds like that team has figured out the All Inboxes feature. If this scenario is correct, I wish they would provide some help to the Windows Outlook team. Help them out with color schemes and user created templates while your at it.

To end on a positive note, I will say the MS Outlook 2010 team hit a home run when it comes to searching and sorting emails!

 

[oju2]

Unified Inbox Workaround

Ok, I'm writing this because I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way to do a unified inbox for Outlook 2010. I will give out a simple 3 step workaround and then one that is a little more elaborate.

First let's agree that Unified Inbox is no more than a particular "VIEW" of your Inbox mails on different account. So this is the same as querying your inboxes. So we can resolve this by doing a simple global query:

Workaround Solution:
1) Press Ctr+Alt+A
2) Type the following in the search box: folder: (Inbox) received: (this week)
3) Hit enter and you should see your Unified inbox for all mails received this week.

A more elaborate solution to automate this is to do a Macro. Won't go into how to do this, but this is the code you need:

1) This is the code for a UNIFIED INBOX:
Sub UnifiedInbox()
Dim myOlApp As New Outlook.Application
txtSearch = "folder:Inbox received: (this week)"
myOlApp.ActiveExplorer.Search txtSearch, olSearchScopeAllFolders
Set myOlApp = Nothing
End Sub

2) This is the code for a UNIFIED SENT BOX:
Sub UnifiedSentbox()
Dim myOlApp As New Outlook.Application
txtSearch = "folder: (Sent Mail) sent: (this week)"
myOlApp.ActiveExplorer.Search txtSearch, olSearchScopeAllFolders
Set myOlApp = Nothing
End Sub

3) Add Buttons to Your Bar:

Finally add custom buttons to your Ribbon to call the respective Macros so you can quickly toggle the Unified Inbox when needed.

By now you should get the idea, so tweak per your own needs!