The root folder is the one that’s at the top of your list. Since Outlook 2010 and later versions, the root folder is your email address itself and is displayed as such.
If you want to change the root folder of your IMAP account, you are at right place.
How to change root folder in Outlook
Although, not many users ever need to change the root folder of their IMAP accounts. But with the older versions of Outlook and some email providers, changing the root folder can solve many problems.
For instance, even with Gmail account added to Outlook, you will get a separate [Gmail] folder with all the systems folders like Sent items, drafts, chats, etc. If you want to get rid of them and instead see all of them under your mail IMAP account, you can change the root folder.
Sometimes, the junk mail folder might also be missing due the conflict with Outlook internal folder structure and the folder structure of mail servers. This too can be solved by making the ‘Inbox’ folder as your root folder.
Setting correct root folder is also very important in older versions of Outlook. The more latest versions like Outlook 2016, 2019, and 365 versions do a fine job of automatically detecting the root folder and syncing all system folders without creating any duplicates and such. But for users with old versions, they might need to check what their root folder is and change it, in case there are some problems like missing sent items and junk folder.
How to do change the root folder in Outlook?
- For Outlook 2007 users, go to Tools > Account Settings > Open ‘Email’ tab
- For users with later versions (2010 and 2013), go to ‘File’ > Section Info > Account Settings > Account Settings > tab email
- Now, double click on the email account that you want to configure the root folder for
- Go to ‘More Settings’ > Advanced
- At the bottom of the advanced settings dialog box, you can set the root folder.
- For most IMAP accounts, putting ‘Inbox’ will create the “Inbox” folder as your root folder. For Gmail users, they can put “[Gmail]” as the root folder (without the quotes but with the square brackets).
For Outlook 2016 and newer versions, go to file > Info > Account Settings > Account Settings
Select the IMAP account > Change
From this IMAP account settings dialog box, go to the ‘Root Folder Path’ field and type in “Inbox” or [Gmail] to make that a root folder for this account.
See the screenshot below for help.
Note, for the newer versions, if you change the root folder from the default (which is the email address itself), any folders created outside of “Inbox” or “[Gmail]” will be removed from Outlook. We hope the above article has helped in changing the root folder to your desired folder and to solve whatever missing folders issue you were facing.