According to Wesley's post, the bug "primarily" affects end-users who haven't downloaded messages to Outlook for several days straight, although some Apps administrators wrote in the forum that the bug has hit end-users who haven't let messages accumulate in Gmail.

, a free Outlook plug-in launched in June 2009, lets users of the Apps Premier and Education editions use Outlook as a front end to the server-side Gmail and Calendar components of the suite. The Premier edition costs US$50 per user per year, while the Education edition is free.

At the launch of Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, Google positioned it as a key element for smoothing the migration of organizations from Exchange to Gmail by giving users the option of using Outlook if they prefer it to the Gmail Web interface.