outlook 2013 does not sync emails until you open "inbox"

Question

Hello. It looks like new mail is not showing up in the IMAP mailbox if that particular mailbox is not open. I have two IMAP accounts configured. If I send a message to both IMAP mailboxes from an external account, only the currently open (displayed) mailbox shows that a new message has been received. The other mailbox is not updated until I click on it and make it an open (displayed) mailbox.

I want both mailboxes to update and display the new message, no matter which mailbox is currently selected. Is there a setting somewhere that controls this? I am using Outlook 2013 on a 64 bit Windows 8.1 machine.

p .s. There is a suspicion that outlook cannot keep 2 imap sessions open at the same time. Thunderbird has this functionality.

Thanks for any help you can offer!

Answer 1

Hi @Кирилл Назаров ,

Welcome to our forum.

I did the same tests as yours in my Outlook(Outlook 2013(15.0.5319.1000)) and seems can successfully reproduce your issue.

When the "not sync" issue happens, have you tried manually clicking the "Send/Receive All Folders" button to see if the issue has any difference there? According to my tests, I found that when the issue occurs, I can immediately receive the new email in other mailbox by manually clicking the "Send/Receive All Folders" button. So, the key of this issue might be related to the sync frequency of the IMAP email accounts in Outlook.

As I know, in Outlook desktop client, we could define the send/receive operations of our email accounts on our own via "Send/Receive groups". So, in order to avoid the impact of sync delays on you as much as possible, please try the steps below:

1. Select Send/Receive > Send/Receive Groups > Define Send/Receive Groups.
2. Select All Accounts > Edit.
3. Select one of your IMAP account from left-side-list, then check the "Include the selected account in this group" box.
4. Make sure "Send mail items" and "Get folder unread count for subscribed folders" are selected.
5. Select "Use the custom behavior defined below" under "Receive mail items" > right click the mailbox and choose "check all subfolders".
   
6. Check the same settings for your another IMAP account and click OK.
7. Then, check the second Schedule an automatic send/receive every n minutes option and modify the sync frequency time to 1 minute so that you won't miss the new emails for too long.
   
8. Click Close and restart your Outlook to see if the issue becomes a little better.

For more information, you could check this similar issue: Outlook 2016 imap accounts don't receive automatically.

Hope this can be helpful.

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Answer 2

@Кирилл Назаров , did you fixed the issue?