Hi all,

I'm curious if it is possible to have Outlook (2013) thread messages into conversations that are in different email accounts.  This could be emails that

1. arrived/been sent in different accounts (Exchange and IMAP) and remain in the different accounts, or
2. arrived/been sent from different accounts, but have been moved to the same account.

For more detail: I have multiple accounts in Outlook (Exchange for work, and IMAP for others), and have been happily using rules to move them as necessary, which is not too often.  Because of some possible email changes at my work, I am contemplating replying to messages from a different account than that which received them.

E.g., I have a message thread from 'myaccount[at]work[dot]com'.  This thread goes back months, and Outlook is great at pulling all the messages from that thread together.   If I respond to that thread from 'myNEWaccount[at]gmail[dot]com', the response is not part of the thread, whether or not

1. I leave the response on the gmail account (so the emails are stored in different accounts), or
2. manually move the message over to the work exchange account (so the emails are all moved to the same account).

Is there a way to get threading to handle this?  Thanks very much for any suggestions!

Hi,

The Outlook conversation group feature uses a Conversation ID field to determine if the message belongs in a conversation with other messages. We can use MFCMAPI tool to view the field:

Since messages in different mailboxes won't have a same Conversation ID, Outlook won't group messages from multiple mailboxes. Manually moving the message to the same mailbox won't help because the messages have different Conversation IDs. The conversation ID field cannot be changed manually.

Regards,

Steve Fan
TechNet Community Support