Why does Outlook still download deleted Gmail messages?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #70, I look at a mysterious case where email that has been
deleted in Gmail continues to download into Outlook.

Deleting vs. archiving

So, the only thing that comes to mind is potentially that what you are doing
is not deleting but archiving. In other words, if you’re on Gmail and you
select a message and you click on “Archive,” that makes it disappear from
Gmail’s inbox, but it’s still present in your “All mail” folder. That means the
message is still there.

Now, depending on how you have Outlook configured, it is possible (if you’re
using, for example, IMAP) that Outlook is still going to download all of the
messages in all of your folders by default. So it will still download those
messages that happen to be in your “All mail” folder in Gmail.

Deleted emails shouldn’t download

Now if you’re using POP3, I’m really kind of surprised. This is not what I
would expect to happen. I would have thought that POP 3 would download only
emails in your inbox.

However, I would absolutely check out the settings in Gmail for both IMAP
and POP3 to indicate which ones are turned on or not – and if possible, which
folders might be referenced by the settings on the Gmail side.

On the Outlook side, I do believe that there are advanced settings that will
control in IMAP which folders Outlook is going to pay attention to. I will be
totally honest and say that that’s not something I’ve played with directly, so I
can’t really give you a really specific answer on exactly what to do there –
but it is at least where I would also have you check.

Check email account settings

Check both the full account settings for that account and potentially even a
per folder setting on the IMAP configuration for that account.

It’s very possible that all of your folders don’t necessarily need to be
synchronized. It’s also possible that you may actually want all of that stuff
in your “All mail” folder.

Delete isn’t delete

And finally, if you’re actually using the Delete button up on Gmail? That
actually will only move the email into the trash. Theoretically, I
would expect it not to be downloaded by IMAP – and certainly not by POP3.

It’s possible that IMAP could download it because it’s another
folder that it needs to deal with.

Like most email programs, Gmail’s Delete really is a deferred delete. In
order to allow you to say, “Oops, I didn’t mean to delete that!” all they
really do is move it into a folder called “Trash.” Then either manually you
have to go in and empty your trash, or you let the trash sit there for a while.
I know that Gmail automatically deletes spam after 30 days. I honestly don’t
know if they apply the same kind of rule to your trash. I believe they do. So
that might be the thing to look at. You might try emptying your trash
before you download your email into Outlook.