Microsoft Details Improved IMAP Support In Outlook 2013

Microsoft Outlook team today announced the improvements in IMAP support that will be part of upcoming Outlook 2013. Here are the new list of IMAP features supported in Outlook.

• Syncing/sending messages is done in the background, so you no longer have to wait for sync to complete in order to use Outlook.General comments about Outlook’s performance when using IMAP was the top issue we heard from all of you, and we believe this change will improve the experience quite a bit.
• New mail notifications are now supported. This was the second most common request we heard.
• Outlook now recognizes special folders in your mailbox like Trash (in techspeak, the IMAP extension XLIST is now supported)
• You can choose how much mail to sync and keep locally by telling Outlook to only sync mail that is newer than a certain number of months, such as 3, 6, or 12 months. You can find this setting under “Change account settings”:

Apart from the above, Microsoft also revealed that they didn’t implement the following IMAP features in Outlook 2013.

• Outlook 2013 will no longer support Download Headers Only mode for IMAP
• And categories will still not be supported for IMAP accounts

Read more about it here.