You need to purge to actually delete mails in Microsoft Outlook 2007

Its been few days I had started using IMAP and Outlook 2007 for my Gmail accounts and I was actually surprised to see that the mails that I used to delete from outlook was not deleted from Gmail account. Instead they were archived by default.

I checked the ALL Mail link in Gmail and found all the deleted mails were residing right there instead of going to trash. The point is by default Outlook does not delete the mails  from the mail server unless you ask it to do so.

So now what you need to do if you want to delete the mails actually from your mail server when you delete any mails from outlook ?  The answer to this is purging.

In your mail account setting where you provide your Organization name and reply to email id, underneath that you will see the option of purging. Lets see what it says :

When you switch to another folder, the items marked for deletion in the original folder are permanently deleted on the  server. Items will not be permanently removed when switching folders offline.

That’s it. So if you keep the purging option on, the mails will be actually get deleted from your mail server. Thanks to Abhijeet with whom I underwent a long discussion to find this when he was thinking to backup his Mails in Gmail.