Outlook 2013 not showing mails in folder

Question

I have a problem with Outlook 2013, which is connected to a Dovecot IMAP-server. The user in Outlook has a lot of folders in his account, which I suspect may be part of the cause.

The problem is, some folders appear to be empty in Outlook, even though the messages in them are new (like 1-2 days old) and have been moved there manually. I checked, and the folders are subscribed in Outlook. The e-mails exist on the server, which is verified by the use of a webmail and they also exist in the user's Maildir on the server.

What can cause outlook to behave this way?

Answer 1

Have you checked whether the user is subscribed to those folders? If they are not subscribed, they wont be checked for updates.

UPDATE: It looks like Outlook 2013 is still having IMAP issues, Outlook has never been a good IMAP client I'm afraid. Consensus seems to suggest a couple of possible fixes. The first is to remove the IMAP account & re-add it. The second is to give Outlook a kick by resetting the ROOT folder. You may be aware that IMAP has a root folder under which all the other folders are specified. The option is in account settings/More options/Advanced. You may need to know the configuration of Dovecot to set this correctly.

I normally use either Mozilla Thunderbird or, more commonly these days, the Roudcube webmail client. Both of which are rather more reliable. I'll add my own personal account to my Work Outlook to see if I get similar issues.

UPDATE 2: I've just connected my personal account which has email going back to the early days of the Internet. I managed to recreate this issue almost immediately. I'm actually thinking it might be a timeout issue with Outlook giving up too quickly. Large folders in particular seem to trigger this issue but not ones that are regularly used (by another email client).