Now that students are able to access a free copy of Office 365 ProPlus, it is now possible to use Microsoft Outlook without paying hundreds of dollars for licenses. Microsoft Outlook is an email and PIM program which works very well with Exchange servers, which is what McGill uses for its email and other services. Outlook also supports other email services, such as Hotmail (also confusingly called Outlook nowadays).
The problem is, a lot of students, including myself, use Gmail, which doesn’t work very well with Outlook for Mac. I have found fixes to two issues that I had. I hope that they are helpful for others who are also trying to set up Gmail on Outlook.
Issue 1: Huge inboxes freeze up Outlook when sending and receiving.
Fix: In Gmail settings (the gear on the upper-right corner of Gmail’s website), go to Forwarding and POP/IMAP > Limit IMAP folders to contain no more than this many messages, then choose a limit which will not make Outlook freeze (experiment a bit).
Issue 2: “Important” emails appear twice.
Fix: In Gmail settings, go to the Labels tab. Uncheck the Show in IMAP checkbox for “Important”.
There you have it. Outlook, working seamlessly with Gmail alongside Exchange and Hotmail!
