What Outlook 2007 does with your E-mails:
It turns out that Outlook 2007 and earlier versions of Outlook (2003, 2000, etc.) take all E-mail from multiple E-mail accounts and dump them into your default Mail account’s inbox! That’s just dandy for individuals, but not for businesses or businesses that operate from a Home-Office situation that have to separate out E-mails going to different business entities like a recent Customer of mine who has 3 different businesses he operates. Fortunately, all three of his E-mail accounts are hosted by an E-mail web-hosting service back in Massachusetts, so they had identical domains which made it fairly easy to figure out his Pop server settings required to get the accounts to work properly with Outlook 2007.
Understanding what the new versions of Oultook 2010/2013 do with your E-mails:
In Outlook 2010 & 2013, when you add multiple E-mail accounts to your Accounts setup each account will get E-mail directed into it’s very own inbox unless you specify otherwise by default. Start with the Default E-mail account, which is the first one you setup, but that can be easily changed if you enter two or more Mail accounts during your setup. Additionally, and this is important for anyone else trying to clean up a Customer’s multi-account, multi-inbox Outlook mess, is that Oultook 2010/2013 allows you to get separate E-mails into each of the E-mail account’s own individual in-boxes, and store the whole thing in a single .pst file!! This is really handy, because you only have to backup that one .pst file (it’s gonna be Big!) to an external hard drive or flash drive. [/FONT]
STEPS TO FIX THE PROBLEM
Create Separate .PST files for each Mailbox account:
First, in an Outlook 2007 multi-inbox setup, you’ll need to setup separate .PST files for each E-mail account from which you wish to receive E-mails. Do this from the left-hand side navigation pane.
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How to sort out messages from multiple E-mail accounts that were dumped into the one big E-mail inbox folder.
Manually sort and move messages from E-mail account with fewer messages to the Default-Primary E-mail inbox first.
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]If you have the situation I had where you have all your Customer’s E-mail messages being left on the Mail server for several months (in my Customer’s case, 13 months worth), you’ll want to sort those out manually and then using Message Filtering Rules which I will cover shortly. In my Customer’s scenario, he had 2,900 messages in his Primary E-mail account, and about 150 messages in his 2nd and 3rd E-mail accounts. E-mail messages in his 2nd and 3rd E-mail accounts were pretty easy to sort out, but not so with his Primary E-mail account (2,900 messages). With all the “aliasing” on his E-mail accounts that my Customer had done in his default-Primary E-mail inbox, it was a nightmare to re-sort after the download of his stored messages from his E-mail server back into his Outlook 2007 inbox.
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If your main Default-Primary inbox has “aliasing”; or multiple names for your Customer (such as “Ron”, “Ron Smith”, “Ronald Smith”, “Ronald G Smith”, etc.) you’ll want to use Message Filtering Rules to help you do the sorting, since trying to do this manually is pretty much of a nightmare. You should consider using the Outlook Mail filtering rules which if you were an E-mail administrator you’d be very familiar with. This step allowed me to sort out the 300 messages that were buried under “alias” Customer names in the 2,900 bulk messages downloaded from his Mail server to the Default-Email account.
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Once you set up your Mail filtering rules (I setup 2 to start with), Outlook 2007 has an APPLY NOW option so you can apply the actions of each Mail filter right after you create it. You’ll want to do this. If you don’t see the Messages being removed from your main Default-Primary inbox immediately from the first Mail Filter Rule you setup, it’s probably not working, and you’ll have to go in and edit/modify the rule to get it properly working to move messages matching your Filter Rule requirement to the 2nd or 3rd inbox on the other E-mail accounts you have setup. After getting your first Mail Filter Rule to work properly with APPLY NOW, you can repeat the process with your 2nd or subsequent Mail Filter Rules. It’s really quite easy and rewarding compared to sorting hundreds of messages by hand dragging-and-dropping them!
DETAILED STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO HELP YOU
The following is re-printed from Separate mail coming from multiple POP3 accounts | HowTo-Outlook; Copyright HowTo-Outlook 2003-2014. All rights reserved.
Microsoft and Microsoft logo’s are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
For Outlook 2007 and previous, when you configure multiple POP3 accounts in Outlook, all the emails will be delivered to the same Inbox folder. In Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013, mail for POP3 accounts is delivered to their own dedicated pst-file. Outlook 2007 and previous can be configured to separate mail of different POP3 accounts as well. Also, Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 can be configured to use a single pst-file again without losing the indication by which account you received a message with.
This guide introduces several techniques which you can use to sort your email based on the account you have received it with.
While this guide is mainly focused on separating mails received from different accounts, the techniques can be used to sort mail based on other criteria as well.
Simply click on each of the links below, and they will take you to the “how-to” guide website and give you a concise 1-page set of steps for each of these useful topics:
Deliver email to a dedicated pst-file per POP3 account
Deliver email to a specific folder within an existing pst-file
Message Rules
Add Accounts column
Arrange By E-mail Account
Automatic Formatting or Conditional Formatting
Filtered Views
Search Folders
IN CONCLUSION
After much manipulation it is possible to separate mail into multiple POP3 accounts using Outlook 2007. And it’s about 99% the same visual appearance to your customer if they have two or more PC’s running different versions of Windows (such as XP, Vista, Win7, or Win8) but each of which is running the Outlook 2010 program. In my customer’s case, he couldn’t afford to purchase an additional Office 2010 license (as he had already used three of his three possible Office 2010 licenses; he bought the standard 3-license pack of Outlook 2010). This would have cost him over $300 had he had Office 2010 Standard version. So, you can make the Outlook 2007 perform in the identical manner that the Outlook 2010 E-mail works with the few simple tweaks I’ve shown here in this article along with creating a few simple Mail Filtering Rules. I hope this article will prove useful to any of you who just want to know whether or not this fix is possible, and a quick way to get it done.
References Used:
“Separate mail coming from multiple POP3 accounts“, article linked and excerpted from “HOW-TO-OUTLOOK” website at: Separate mail coming from multiple POP3 accounts | HowTo-Outlook; Copyright HowTo-Outlook 2003-2014. All rights reserved.
Microsoft and Microsoft logo’s are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
Please Note: No author was cited as having written this article, so I believe it is Public Domain. Every attempt was made to cite the Author.
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