Today I needed to resend an email I sent a day before – using Outlook 2011 for Mac. It took a while to compose this email so I got quite scared when I looked at my “Sent Items” folder and the mail wasn’t there.

My situation: I’m using an Exchange mailbox is primary mailbox and have a POP3 account for my university email address. The latter I only use to send emails (as the actual university email address is just a forwarding). If you have a similar setup and problem, read on.

On Outlook for Windows, sending an email through this email address/account, moves the sent email to the main “Sent Items” folder – which at the same time is the “Sent Items” folder for my Exchange mailbox.

Not so on Outlook for Mac. Here we have a separate “Sent Items” folder for POP3 accounts (called “On my computer”). I had this folder disabled since (I thought) I only use my Exchange mailbox. The option hide/show this folder is in the preferences under “General”. (I only have the German version of Outlook, so screenshots are in German only; sorry for that.)

Option to show or hide the "On my computer" folder(s).

Now the “On my computer” folder showed up in my “Sent Items” folder and there my mails were.

Sent items on my computer folder

Now, the quest at hand was: How do I get my sent mails into my “Sent Items” Exchange folder. The solution: Create a rule for this.

So, I went to “Settings” –> “Rules” and created a new rule in the “Outgoing” rules section.

Creating a local rule

Here you create a rule with:

• Condition: Account is YourPop3Account

• Execute: Move message to “Sent Items (Exchange)”

Leave the rest as it is and hit “OK”. Now try to send an email from your POP3 account and, voilà, the email you just sent should appear in your Exchange’s “Sent Items” folder.