Is it possible to aggregate multiple email accounts into a single Outlook 2007 Inbox/.OST file?

Question

I'm using Outlook 2007 and would like to combine multiple email accounts (some are Exchange, some IMAP) into a single Inbox/.OST mail file. An example of the functionality I'm looking for is the Blackberry, where you can configure multiple email accounts and then access that mail either by the inbox for that specific account or via a single aggregated mailbox. In the single mailbox case, when you reply to a given piece of mail the Blackberry is smart enough to switch your "From" address to be that of the account where the email came in to. I'm essentially looking for this functionality in Outlook.

Are there native options and/or third party plug-ins which do this?

Answer 1

Native outlook will support as many email addresses as you like - I have a dozen or so from three different ISP's. They are all within a single Outlook .pst file.

For POP3, you can set these up by email address.

Outlook does not support aggregating email across mail types (that is POP3, IMAP, and other web based mail [GMail, Yahoo etc]). You could route all the mail through an intermediate forwarding account but that is a bit of a Kludge. It requires some effort to set up and maintain and does not preserve the original sender's details well.

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Response to comment ...

I have done a little digging at Microsoft. Evidently all the POP3 email (which is downloaded to your PC) is kept in *.PST file (Personal Folders File). All IMAP email is kept in a *.OST file (Offline Folders File). Currently I use only POP email. Whenever I have used IMAP folders, i didn't use POP on the same machine.

I am not sure exactly how email is presented to an Outlook user who uses both IMAP and POP.

I do believe that RIM (Blackberry) acts a proxy to its users so it can present a single consolidated view to its users; that is, they retrieve email from all of a customers native accounts and consolidates on their machines. The consolidated email is then presented to the customer. You could perhaps go to the trouble of doing something similar if seeing all your email in just the *.OST or just *.PST is important to you.

You could forward all the POP email to an OST account or vice versa - but I do not know offhand if you can set this so that the forwarded email will appear to have come from the original sender or from the forwarding email account.

Sorry if this wasn't much help.

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Response to comment ...

I think it might not be possible because you are using two different email server types (in your case IMAP and Exchange - sorry I used POP in my earlier answer since it does not apply to your question). Outlook manages email synchronisation of between your PC and your email server by account type at the folder level, so I think you cannot mix Exchange and IMAP within a single folder.

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Response to comment ...

The only way I can think of to get what you are looking for is to run all your mail through an intermediate email client that supports "REDIRECT" so that it winds up in a single OST folder.

REDIRECT passes email to a recipient with out changing it whereas FORWARDed email is changed so that the recipient can plainly see that it has been forwarded. To the recipient REDIRECTed email appears to have come from the original sender and not from the redirector. This feature is not implemented in Outlook. There may be other email clients that implement a redirect function that I am not aware of.

There is a REDIRECT add-in for Outlook that has to be installed on both the redirecting machine and on the receiving machine, but it is not free. You would likely want to invoke this from a rule (to avoid having to resending all your mail manually), and I do not know if the add-in supports that.

See http://www.office-addins.com/-outlook-addins/redirect-for-outlook.html

Answer 2

Using POP3 would tie your emails to one machine, where IMAP keeps them synchronised on all machines and the cloud. However, you cannot use one .pst file with multiple IMAP accounts.

I have three Hotmail accounts, six POP3 accounts (from website mailboxes) and two IMAP accounts all forwarding to one externally hosted Exchange account (BPOS) and it works perfectly.

Basically, just set up email forwarding from your other accounts and set your primary account to be able to send email using those account addresses, if needed.