Unless I’m missing something (and maybe I am – my friend’s computer is far away and I can’t tinker with it right now) the problem is that Outlook seems to have no access to this saved draft. That is, the “Drafts” folder is empty, and there is nothing you can click on to open the draft. The only way you can access the draft is to explicitly log in to the Gmail server through the web interface.
If the purpose of IMAP is to keep a device and the server in sync, shouldn’t the “Drafts” folder on Gmail at least be visible in Outlook? Because AFAICT, it isn’t. So the normal way of handling a draft – open it in Outlook, make some edits or whatever, and then send it – appears to be unavailable.
Usually, there is some way to tell the email client what folder to use for the standard compliment - Inbox, Outbox, Sent, Junk, Drafts. I don’t know how to do this in Outlook, but Mac Mail lets me choose the correct folder (for some reason, there’s no standard - some systems use “Sent” and some use “Sent Mail,” for example.)
Yes, as far as I know it should. In every IMAP client I’ve used (well, not a lot, maybe 3 of them but Outlook wasn’t one of them), the client can see every folder on the server.
Does this help at all?
Thanks, the replies give me clues as to what to look for, which is helpful, but I won’t know more until next week when I can get over there and try playing with it some more. A really definitive answer could only come from someone who’s actually using Outlook 2021 + IMAP + Gmail, and so far even the interwebs have failed to provide a solution, though oddly there are reports of the reverse problem – someone wants their drafts saved to the server, but they’re only saved to the local folder!
For the sake of completeness I’ll update this if and when I have any more useful information next week, and of course would appreciate any further comments.
I will say that once again I’m very disappointed in Microsoft. The Office 2021 suite was fairly expensive software and yet they can’t even be bothered to support OAuth 2.0 with POP3 which would be ideal for this use case. There’s no reason for this. Thunderbird supports it just fine, and it’s free! OAuth is really the only reason we’re going with IMAP because it looks like Gmail will be discontinuing the “app password” method either by September 30 or at some point thereafter – it’s definitely depricated.