India Four Two.
I can see that IMAP would be a good way to go in the future, but I think I have too much 'invested' in pop/smtp and Outlook at the moment to consider a change. Remember I currently have two different folder structures on two different laptops. As I understand it going down the IMAP route would necessitate a common folder structure - this would not suit.
With my current laptop set up, I backup the outlook.pst file on a regular basis and so I have not had a loss of email 'problem' that I could not get around. I was hoping to find out where the iMac stores the equivalent folder and back that up to an external hard drive - in addition to regular Time Machine backups. Makes sense?
I specified the new iMac to have a 1TB Fusion drive which seems plenty fast enough for me - at the moment anyway!
Will look into the book etc - thank you.