Upgrading my Windows Live Mail from POP to IMAP

[Hereward-Stone]

I am currently attempting to change all of my email addresses in WLM from POP to IMAP.

In the Incoming mail field do I enter imap.btinternet.com or mail.btinternet.com?

In the outgoing mail field do I enter smtp.btinternet.com or mail.btinternet.com?

The former seems correct but I'm not sure which is why I'm asking.

[licquorice · Accepted solution]

First of all you can't change from POP3 to IMAP on the fly, you need to delete and re-create the account.

The correct server is and always has been for all flavours of the BT mail system mail.btinternet.com

For IMAP, the port is 993 with SSL selected, SMTP is 465 with SSL selected.

[Hereward-Stone]

Thank you for the information that’s what I will use.

I have only changed one so far and I did it by by right-clicking on the account name in the folder pane and selecting Properties. Then on the General tab, I de-selected “include this message when receiving mail or synchronizing. This stops the any messages being sent or received.

 I was then able to create a new email address using IMAP instead of POP. This way I was able to check that all of my messages had been recreated and add in any that were missing.

 For my first attempt at this I did set the outgoing address as smtp.btinternet.com and it did work.

But I will now follow your advice and redo it using mail as advised.

Thank you for your help.

[Hereward-Stone]

Hi and thank for your help so far, as per the advice given in message 2 above I deleted the POP account and created an IMAP one. It all works apart from the delete function.

When I try to empty the deleted items folder a box appears saying

An unknown error has occurred

And when I click “details” a box opens with the message

invalid STORE command syntax, invalid message set syntax

Configuration:

   Account: Removed by me

   Server: mail.btinternet.com

   User name: removed by me

   Protocol: IMAP

   Port: 993

   Secure(SSL): 1

   Code: 800cccd3

Please can you help me to fix this?

Additional info:

The first account I changed was an old Virgin email address and I can delete messages from that one.

I also have a Gmail one which has always been IMAP and that works.

It’s the BT one I’m having a problem with.

[licquorice]

The 'Deleted items' folder is now called 'Trash' if you have been migrated from BTYahoo mail to BT mail. Do you have a 'Trash' folder shown in WLM? If so, just delete the 'Deleted Items' folder and items you delete will go to the 'Trash' folder.

[Hereward-Stone]

Option to delete, Deleted Items folder greyed out/ not available

So I moved the items to be deleted from the Deleted items folder to Trash

Then I went to Properties / IMAP and changed the Deleted Items path to Trash

I was then able to delete the Deleted Items folder.

I can now see an X at the end of the Trash folder which if I hover over it says “Empty his Folder”

I clicked that but then got the same message as shown in message 4

That’s disappointing it sounded like it would work. 

[licquorice]

Hmm, that should have worked. Might be worth closing WLM and re-starting.

[Hereward-Stone]

Closed WLM and restarted it. Still same problem

Closed WLM and rebooted my PC. Still have the same problem

What does the message “invalid STORE command syntax, invalid message set syntax” mean?

[licquorice]

Can you delete items individually from the Trash folder and it is just the empty functionality that isn't working. I presume the message means the command being executed by clicking on the empty folder icon isn't being recognised.

[licquorice]

Just a thought, when you mapped the deleted items to the Trash folder did you use an upper or lower case T for Trash as it is case sensitive and needs to be upper case.