Sent mailbox is different on Outlook vs. on webmail

#1

Hi

When I log in to the mxroute webmail platform and check my sent box, the emails are different to the ones I see on my outlook app on my phone.

Emails I send on webmail site appears in the webmail sent box, and emails I send on my phone only appears in outlook’s sent box.

Can anyone help explain what’s happening here?

Thanks

Edit: Checked the sent folders in other email apps through cPanel (e.g. horde and rainloop) and they also show different emails in there. What is happening?

#2

The Sent folder is actually not a server function, and is made more confusing by services like Gmail that have made it a server function (by using in-house software that no one else can use, it’s only theirs). Your email client actually writes the sent messages back to the server in a folder of it’s choice. Sometimes, two email clients will have a different default choice for what that folder is. For example, some might write it to a subfolder of inbox like INBOX/Sent. Some might write it to just Sent. Others still, like iOS, might write to Sent Messages.

If you go into our Roundcube email, you can find 3 vertical dots around the top left, just to the right of where it says your email address. Click that and then Manage Folders. You might see here that Apple Mail wrote sent messages to a different folder, and with that you might be able to click the switch to the right of it so that it turns blue, allowing you to see that folder in Roundcube.

With Outlook it may default to a different folder, while our Roundcube instance defaults to Sent. You can change them if you want, or just do like I do and have different sent folders from both clients because they just default that way and I just don’t care how it looks for my personal usage.

In Roundcube if you go into Settings and then Special Folders, you can change which folders are used by Roundcube for Drafts, Sent, Junk, Trash, and Archive.

In Outlook you can change which folder is used to store sent messages with these instructions: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-where-sent-email-messages-are-saved-bd95ef3b-8c04-466a-8576-d1ce0eabeb2c

Sadly there are no sane defaults that I’ve found to hit the most targets. So long as email software clients refuse to agree on a standard, these variations will continue to exist.