I'm helping a friend out with her email on her laptop as she is fairly new to all this and she has a GMail account that I have sucessfully managed to get working in Outlook 2007. She also has a domain name that at the moment she is using just for sending emails which was also set up correctly yesterday and she was able to send email from it.

The problem is that she has had to go back to GMail on the web as the following has occurred.

"Things aren't sending from Outlook as the IMAP connection closes down if it's not used for a bit. I've closed down Outlook and logged back in to no avail."

Does anyone have any ideas as to why this might be and how to stop it? I did a search on Google (& here) and there are mentions of this problem but no suggestion as to how to fix it.

Thanks in advance.

In Outlook 2003, and I suspect in 2007 (don't have a 2007 machine handy), there is a setting under Tools-Options-Mail Setup-Send/Receive called Schedule an automatic send/receive every __ minutes. I have mine set to 1 minute. Try this and see if it doesn't keep you logged in to your IMAP account.

Turn off automatic sending and receiving. One of the server guys once explained me to me why this works even though it seems to be the opposite of what you need. I've long forgotten, but this is a part of the standard IMAP on Outlook setup that we do.

Thanks, she's going to try both of those hen she gets home and I'll let you know if anything develops.

More for your information than saying "get Thunderbird"...

TB works very nicely with GMail IMAP. I just wish I had gotten IMAP into my thick skull a long time ago.

I second that. See all your mail from any PC. Also, people who run mail servers are usually better at backing them up than the average PC user. When your hard disk crashes you don't lose all your old email.

I will second the proposal for Thunderbird. It seems to handle IMAP much more elegantly than Outlook. Having an IMAP templates folder shared among all my pc's is a godsend!

I was a Thunderbird user for 2-3 years, but the lack of Blackberry synchronization, the inability to use Outlook-specific plugins, the loss of integrated calendaring, and no effective support for Windows Desktop Search brought me back to the Outlook fold (for better or worse).

The beauty of Gmail is that all of your mail is archived by default, even when sent/received from a "fat" mail client via SMTP and IMAP/POP. So regardless of which mail client you use, all of your inbound and outbound messages remain searchable via the GMail web interface (and on a Blackberry, through the Google Apps GMail client!).