Sync'ing MSO Outlook emails across 2 PCs

An elderly friend has a desktop and a laptop, both running Windows 10, both running MS Office (I think it's MSO 2003 on desktop and MSO 2010 on the laptop).

She has an ISP email address which is used from the desktop and a gmail address which she uses on the laptop. She's asked me if she can use the ISP address on the laptop.

Clearly the simple answer is yes. But�

So her ISP emails are held on the client and not on the web. The problem, as I see it, is that using the laptop for ISP emails would have one (or perhaps both) of two problems.

If she uses MS Office Outlook on the laptop then and emails sent and received on the laptop would be held on the laptop � and vice versa for the desktop. Even if the laptop was set not to delete emails from the server so that such emails would also appear on the desktop, emails she sends from the laptop would not be get to the desktop.

If she uses web mail from the laptop then the desktop would have no knowledge of emails sent.

I don�t know if there�s any way of synchronising the Sent Items box. I don�t know whether using IMAP emails rather than POP3 would give any benefit.

Though not certain but I'm assuming that she wouldn't be using both PCs at essentially the same time.

And no, she won't change from using her ISP Email address. She's knows the downsides if she ever changes her ISP so it's not worth even trying to go down that path.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

I don�t know whether using IMAP emails rather than POP3 would give any benefit.

This is exactly what IMAP is intended for.I use it to synchronize the same mail accounts on two computers, two tablets and a phone. Works a treat.

Who is her ISP? Not all ISPs provide IMAP email.

Eclipse, same as me, and they do.

As has already been said, IMAP is the fundamental part of the answer. Make sure you back up the Outlook .pst files before switching over to IMAP, as you will need to upload all the existing e-mail to the IMAP server in order to access it from other devices, and the possibility exists for this to go wrong.

The free MailStore Home can be a useful tool for backing up Outlook and data on an IMAP server.


If your friend is really still using Outlook 2003, I would think seriously about continuing to use it. Office 2003 and earlier are all End of Life, meaning there will be no further security updates. Seeing as e-mail clients are a common source of security issues, using an old and unsupported mail client seems unwise.

Once your friend has switched to IMAP, there are plenty of good free mail clients available, such as Thunderbird. That said, if she owns a retail copy of Office 2010, she likely has the right to install that single copy of Office on a desktop and a laptop, so long as the two are not used simultaneously.