Outlook favourites disappearing

After being a long-standing user of Microsoft's Outlook email program, I recently upgraded to 2010 and set it up to access my multitude of gmail accounts.

As I'm a fan of the tree-view, this became somewhat cluttered, so I thought I'd make 1000 MSDevs dreams come true and put the "Favourites" section to good use.  Simply find the folder you want to add to favourites and either Right-Click, "Show in Favourites" or just drag it there.




To order them nicely once they're in the favourites, right click the favourites folder and select "Move up", "Move down" or just drag the thing where you want it.

Wonderful!  I've learnt something new and helpful - so I start using my favourites :)

A while later I go into outlook to check a calendar entry, then head to my email folders and...dammit, where'd the favourites go?  Try as I might I can't even get the original favourites back!After fiddling for a while I resort to Google "outlook 2010 favourites folder missing".  Wow, common problem.  The resolution from most of them is to run Outlook.exe from the command line (or Start, run/search line) with a parameter of /resetnavpane.

This works.  But sooner or later while I'm working, I get back to my Folders and the damn things favourites are missing again.  So now I look carefully at what I'm doing versus what starting outlook with the /resetnavpane option is doing - and then the penny drops...quite far, but it drops :)

Whenever I want to get back to my Mail folders (normally from working in my Calendar or Tasks) I use the Navpane icons below all my folders to get there.

What I was doing was using the Folder List option to get back to my mail folders - whereas when you run Outlook /resetnavpane, outlook starts with the Mail option selected.

Sure enough, when I clicked on the Folder List option my Favourites immediately disappeared - it was a different view, but so similar to the Mail option with one exception - no Favourites.

When I clicked on the Mail option - tadaa - my Favourites came back!

So now I just use the Mail option to navigate back to my Mail folders.  You can also just push Ctrl+1 and it will do the same thing.