It’s been the end of a very busy week here at G2 Support but I just wanted to update you on our trials of the new Google Outlook Sync tool. We plan to do a full guide to setting up the sync tool in the future as well as a workaround to a few issues, but for now here’s a summary of a week with the Outlook Sync tool.

So far the results have been mixed. We’ve used it to import various sizes of mailboxes and also as a live sync tool to download emails from Google in to a new Outlook PST and to sync changes on-the-fly.

Bad news first
By far the most issues came when we were trying to import an existing Outlook mailbox in to Google Apps. In our case it was one of a number of Exchange accounts. The biggest issue appeared to be that the sync tool just stopped syncing at random times. There are few settings in the sync tool to play with and adjusting the size of the expected mailbox by right clicking the sync tool icon seemed to do little to help this. Quite a few times we were left with an apparently fully synced mailbox which was missing all emails from the last 48 hours (for example, though in some cases we were missing several weeks worth). Closing and re-opening the sync tool didn’t help in these situations and the only way to kick start things was to re-run the initial import, but of course that leaves you with duplicate items; not much fun when you have thousands of emails to sift through.

Above: Duplicates in Outlook. Below: The same duplicates in Google Apps

Now the good news
The good news is that we had more luck when using the sync tool as a replacement to IMAP to allow us to use Outlook with our Google Apps account. Starting with a populated Google Apps inbox we used the sync tool to fill Outlook with emails, calendar items and contacts and we could use it without any problem. It certainly gave us a better experience, and fewer issues, than using IMAP between the two.

It may be that the issues we’ve had here with the sync tool failing to import email are down to the functions responsible for reading email from an existing Outlook mailbox rather than any issue with the syncing part of the tool. If this is the case then people who want to use Outlook with an existing Google Apps inbox or to replace IMAP should be fine.

We’d like to see more options in the sync tool, particularly a better indication of what it’s doing, which emails have been synced, which are currently being synced, easy access to a log file etc. A de-duplication feature would be a god-send as well.

You may have completely different results to us, and if you do find a solution to any of the problems here do let us know. We’ll be posting more about the sync tool in the future after we have some more real world experience of it.