I use Outlook 2013 in the following scenario
- My email domain is hosted at GoDaddy
- We do not use Exchange services, so I pick up email on POP with leave a copy on server enabled
Now I'll be the first to admit this is not ideal, but we're in a startup organisation, and we're keeping our overheads low :)
Now...this means that my work email id connects using Outlook 2013, and creates and .ost file for email storage on the local device.
What happened for me was my PC died and I had to reinstall Windows and apps from scratch. Fortunately I had a backup of My Documents, and Office 2013 saves ost files in that same folder (sub folder is Outlook files).
So here's what I did:
- On my newly installed Outlook instance I recreated my email account with POP3/SMTP settings as they should be.
- This then downloaded everything on the server and created a 87 mb .ost file (*** Email address is removed for privacy *** with a .ost extension)
- Now at this point I had my inbox, but no old calendar entries or contacts or notes or sent items. hm.
- I then copied my original .ost file (which had the same *** Email address is removed for privacy *** name) into my new Documents > Outlook Files folder)
- Opened outlook up again, and voila, all my email/sent items and everything else magically reappeared.
Now, I didn't have an exchange account so that's why this worked. That being said if you have an exchange server then the .ost is simply a replica of your server mailbox and this whole exercise is moot.
With regards to IMAP, you shouldn't have to go through this at all...since IMAP folders are fully synchronized with the server folders, but you're welcome to try.
Hope this helps.
On a side note: In all of this I realized another downside of using the PoP3 method...which is that on my phone/tablet device, any mails I send do not synchronize with my mailbox. Thankfully, that's not a huge issue for me because I use those sparingly for
mail sends.