How to remove Important and All Mail folders Gmail and Microsoft Outlook
One thing to learn about setting up your Gmail in Outlook using IMAP is that there are 2 folders that are not really needed when viewing in Outlook: the “All Mail” and “Important” folders. Not only are they redundant, but these can also cause your Outlook to constantly synchronize and all it’s really doing is syncing duplicated data over and over…and a lot of it!
Basically, those 2 folders are duplicates of what is in the inbox. The “All Mail” is, literally, all of your email and the sent folders. The “Important” is still an unknown filter that Gmail sets up, I guess with what Gmail deems important. Either way, it’s usually just a duplicate of the inbox.
When setting up Gmail in Outlook, these 2 folders will also setup. They are hiding under the subfolder “Gmail” under the Inbox. You need to open that arrow to view the folders, “All Mail”, “Important” and “Sent”.
To remove those from your view in Outlook, the easiest way is to remove it from your Gmail settings. Log into your Gmail on the browser, then go to the wrench “settings” button in the upper right corner of the browser, then go down to “settings” and then click on the tab for “Labels”.
Click on “Hide” for both and uncheck “Show in IMAP” and then refresh your Outlook and those folders should go away from the view.
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Category: Outlook Support
About the Author (Author Profile)
Lisa Hendrickson is the owner of Call That Girl. She is an Outlook Expert and Microsoft 365 Consultant.Subscribe
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This tip solved a long time annoyance with Gmail. Unchecking IMAP has the effect of removing the redundant ‘All Mail’ and ‘Important’ folders to my Thunderbird email client as well. We have the technology!