Gordon wrote...

It doesn't. That's how IMAP works. (It's different in Outlook 2010 I'm
told).
It's because an IMAP account mirrors what's on the server.
You can either choose to hide messages marked for deletion or you can set
Outlook to purge messages (that's how you get rid of them) with various
settings, ie on exit, or moving to another folder etc.

Thanks Gordon.

Just got to find those settings...

The Outlook Help isn't much help, I found. I fired it up and in the search bar
typed "delete message" (without the quotes). It brought up dozens of hits, none
of which related to deleting messages, either normally or in IMAP mode.

Now, another question.

With Outlook I have a number of email accounts set up. However, with the move to
IMAP I'm only using one of them, the one that actually supports IMAP services.

The others are set to forward emails to that account. I've done this via the
respective webmail services.

So, I might receive say 3 emails that are for:

(the IMAP account)
(Yahoo account)
(former ISP account that I've retained)

As is used for the IMAP service 2 and 3 forward email automatically
to 1.

Now, I've deleted those profiles in Outlook, and just have the one email
account.

What's the best way to reinstate those email accounts in Outlook, so when an
email sent to say, me2 can be replied to from the me2 account?

Should I reinstate them but simply disable email retrieving? And have it sent
via the Me1 account? The only problem is whether the me1 ISP will allow emails
from a different domain to be sent through its servers.

The actual email accounts that I use are from a former ISP, but as all mailing
lists and most contacts use that address to send me stuff it was going to be a
bit of a pain. But because it's a dialup ISP I have a casual emergency ISP
account if ADSL goes down. So I can keep the email address. The others are Yahoo
email accounts and the DSL ISP's IMAP account.

Hope this isn't too confusing, nor the questions too dumb.

Thanks