Discussion on:

10 tips for speeding up Outlook

Sharing it with co-workers!

Can you be more specific. What, exactly, do you mean by "the last straw"? What was it about this particular article that set you off?

Gee whiz, we're really going to miss you.

Bye!

For Exchange users on a poor network connection (our wireless infrastructure in the warehouse was pretty poor a couple years ago) I found Kerbtray alleviated much of the connection issues.
Combining this with cached mode greatly improved performance.

remove any duplicates, there are good mini apps to find dups

save a backup .pst for restorations

delete old emails, rely on archived backup to restore an old email

remove duplicates after any restore

I concur with No. 5. > The bigger the PST file size the longer it will take to open Outlook. We always recommend max size of 1.2GB for PST files.
Thanks Jack for the tips!

I envy you.. some of the PST files I have encountered have been in excess of 8 gigs

I have encountered 20+ GB PSTs in recent months. Some of the people I support have saved every email they have sent or received for the last 10+ years in a single PST. Every time I encounter this breed of user, I encourage them to split their archives into smaller chunks and to disconnect older PSTs that are not needed on a daily basis. You would think I had horns the way some of them look at me when I suggest that.

This is why I dislike AutoArchive. The user delegates the clean-up responsibility to a tool that does no filtering; it saves everything. Receipts, jokes, Out of Office replies, etc. I can't force the user to not copy each and every item into his .PST, but I'm not going to enable a tool to move everything en masse.

As to .PST size slowing Outlook down, what difference does it make whether it's the default .PST that's huge or the user-created one(s)? Most of the slow-downs I've seen are due more to the user-created .PSTs than their default destination.

We require (via GPO) archive files be no larger than 3.5Gb, to maintain porability (will fit on a DVD). When a user leaves the company, we archive all that users .PSTs on DVDs and free up that disk space. Then 18 months later when that users' boss asks IT for that ex-employee's archives (and you know they will), we make a copy(s) of the DVD(s) and give them to that boss.

I tend to store "projects" in their own PST file and then disconnect when the project is done. At home I'm not a "pack rat". So my PST is small [156MB].
PSTs greater than 2GB for Outlook 2003 and before aren't recommended.
I knew one guy who [at work] exceeded 31,000 messages in his inbox alone. It took 75 minutes to sync with exchange when he got a new laptop.

With speed issues, the first thing I always do is delete the normalemail.dot file, this resolves speed issues most of the time, surprised it wasn't mentioned

In the early days I used to love Outlook; however now that Google Apps is around; I leave it to Google to handle all the processing power and I simply click and instantly get the stuff Outlook struggles with.

And when Google has an outage [aften enough], you a scr?wed.
I read a story about someone using Gmail had their account hacked. All Email [6+ years] was trashed. Except for the fact that the guy knew a big shot at Google, his mail would of been lost.

If not google apps syncs with outlook, sure you can use it through webmail, but users still want to use outlook

Our ISP is using a local GMAIL server with IMAP to handle server based email. They migrated from exchange, so they won't have to support it anymore. Once everyone is over on the new server, they will give it to the Google cloud.

I still use Outlook(Office 2003) to read my email. I haven't messed with the Google apps yet.

I have often noticed that excessive reminders tends to slow things down. By excessive I literally mean dozens an hour. The alternative of course is to use the task list. But some-how many users are not happy unless they get to close the reminder window every 15 minutes.

Another is turning off the reading pane and the preview pane. It might not seem like much. but those two, slow down managing e-mails when you are moving things around and organizing when it has to open up each e-mail when you click on it to move it.

Like everything else when taken to excesses. Having hundreds of rules to help automate organizing your e-mails can slow your outlook down.

I agree with 1&2 #3... archiving your inbox is great however in many cases that just means you have 2 pst files instead of one and many use it as a dumping ground,
#4 is almost necessary if your exchange server is offsite.
#5 & #6 are absolutely necessary for those with huge PST files
#7... Hmmm never knew anyone that had more than a half dozen
#8 Also I have never seen an issue with slowness due to the feeds
#9 The Achilles heel of any program... Plug-ins and Add-ins Some are great but you never know they are a problem until they are removed.

We had similar problems before we started setting time limits on the "key" folders. According to Microsoft, this includes inbox, deleted items & sent items. Keep those folders under a few hundred and outlook will benefit. Since we use the cloud for email archiving we didn't get a lot of push back from users when we set Exchange to automatically delete message in those folders older than X days.

Well, I don't use Outlook 2007 with Exchange, only POP3, but it has always been slow and as for Outlook 2010 I refuse to update 2007 users. The Outlook 2010 install time gives a clue to the degree of bloat. I've got a Win 7 i7 PC with 8GB which is not the slowest PC on the block. I've tried virtually all the tricks listed and they make little difference. Of course I keep Windows up to date and none of the MS updates over the last 2 years has made the slightest difference. Yes I compact the PST file quite often and try to keep it below 2GB and I use Scanpst every so often as the file does corrupt easily and this does slow things a bit. I keep an eye on add-ins. The bottom line is Outlook is severely bloated with suspect software architecture and in my opinion there is virtually nothing the user can do to make it run sensibly fast. Each version of Outlook since 2003 has run more slowly than the last so the 'Outlook' is bleak!

Also have a Core i7 Win 7 with 8GB of RAM. Outlook opens quite fast for me.
Never had a corrupt PST. I've seen others but that was just in the old days of Outlook 2003 or before. Tried mine. Opened in 2 seconds after clicking the icon in the Start/Orb menu.

Having just installed Outlook 2007 on another device using the same email providers, I can see that the real issue with Outlook 2007 onwards is the many seconds of delay the user suffers using POP3 connection. I have no idea what Outlook 2007 does whilst 'downloading' these files e.g. simply going to sleep? I gather from other web comments the cause is a MS bad re-write of the code after version 2003 and POP3 performance was not considered relevant?

Fortunately I deal with Outlook and heavy users since year 2000. Heavy use and support because this is the MAIN application in our office. Used outlook in office 2000, office XP, office 2003, 2007 and now 2010.

I agree with all tips above, but I add some more:

- Network Connection: Is good to have gigabit connections in the network for users. Outlook communication with Exchange is heavy.

- I have VIP users with big mailboxes. But now I only keep some months in the mailbox. I save all old emails in PST files.

- Split PST files. I split the files in years. I have users receiving 300 emails a day, one year of email have 10GB PSTs.

- If possible, move cache OST or PST files to SSD disks.

- Remember to backup PST files with special tools likd Datamills EdgeSafe (http://www.datamills.com/products/edgesafe-pst-backup). You can backup pst even if outlook is open, backup pst from local store to central server or location and you can make incremental backups. This saves time and space.

- Use third party tools like EAS: Email Archive System to keep users mailboxes small. This server app remove attachments from exchange as well (users will have an icon to check archived emails - prior to 3 months for example and attachments)

- Remove duplicate data with free tools like ODIR. Very usefull!

- Remember: a big mailbox affect Blackberry Enterprise performance as well

What a silly question--who still uses Outlook? You might not like it, but millions still do use it! I have mixed feelings about it, but it has plenty of strengths. Your comparisions to Yahoo and Gmail are irrelevant here.

To topic: I strongly support the notion of splitting PSTs. While newer versions of Outlook support larger than 2 GB PST files, I'd be very careful letting them get too big.

Just about every major company uses Outlook. there is no other client that does what Outlook does for businesses. Lotus Notes it REALLy bloated anbd dead. Hasn't had a major update since BEFORE Windows 7. No new version on the horizon. And there really isn't much else.

@alexisgarcia, I agree with your suggestions as well, and most of all, gigabit connections help immensely, especially if you are using Exchange.

I would suggest stopping the use of PST files if you are only supporting Exchange users (no POP3 or IMAP from other email sources).

We are using Symantec Enterprise Vault, but I think there may be better solutions available. We have a lot of messages with large attachments, and using the mail archiving solution has helped me maintain a manageable exchange database. I think this also helps Outlook run much faster too.

It's the size of the attachments.

If I could, I'd ban attachments. They take up the majority of space; the recipient has no control over the size he receives; and users don't understand the dangers of editing an attachment without first saving it as a separate file.

Outlook is a vestige of the quaint bygone era when the desktop was king. Now that the cloud is moving towards the mainstream and people use multiple devices, thin is in, which means Outlook is just Out.

For fast email, the only word you need to know is gmail. I manage 11 email addresses seamlessly across three devices (desktop, laptop, Android smartphone).

Yes, sure, there is Outlook.com and Microsoft is building its web ecosystem (Bing, SkyDrive, etc.) I suppose it might be competitive. If that's your thing, knock yourself out.

But, shucks, I don't launch MSIE on any of my devices, whereas Chrome is my default browser. Google's ecosystem makes more sense to me.

Maybe you are just anti-Microsoft.
11 businesses with Gmail? Questions: Do you trust Google to restore your data if someone hacks your account and wipes out your data? Do you have a central address book where you can update an address and everyone get it immediately? How big are those businesses? 5 people? 10? Can you manage 10,000 users with Gmail? How about 1,000? 500? 100?

You are 200% right!. Global Address List is not available in Gmail, You cannot trust 100% in Gmail backups, and I believe you cannot use colaboration (i.e: share email folders) with another co-workers, I think.

Tip # 2 includes the following:
"When you connect Outlook with either IMAP or POP3, you should have Outlook set up to download the complete message (instead of just the header). If you do this, Outlook wont have to sync with the server every time you click on a new item (as it will already be in the data file.) How you do this will depend upon which version of Outlook youre using. But basically, youre looking for the setting Download Complete Item Including Attachments."

I have found that downloading complete items can be really problematic, if you are a road warrior who has to deal with slow internet connections. If someone sends you a large file attachment, and you have Outlook configured to download the complete item, guess who is not going to see the rest of their email until the huge file download completes? Many times, messages with huge file attachments can wait until one is back in the office, where they (hopefully) have a decent connection speed. I configured Outlook to "Download complete items including attachments", but I also enabled (checked) the option that reads "Download only headers for items larger than", and selected 512 KB (half a MB) as the limit.

This setting provides a good balance, and has worked well for me, especially when dealing with a connection that may be less than 1 Mbps (megabit per second) and suffers from a low Consistency of Service measure. To find this setting in Outlook 2003, click on Tools | Options... Select the Mail Setup tab. Click on the "Send/Receive..." button. Select the appropriate accounts (I selected All Accounts). Click on the Edit... button. You should see these folder options in the lower half of the resulting dialog. If you have more than one account, you can set individual limits per account.

For more information on measuring connection speed and consistency of service, I recommend using VisualWare's free test tool: http://myspeed.visualware.com/index.php. They offer a FAQ site (http://www.myconnectionserver.com/support/faq.html), along with several white papers (http://www.myconnectionserver.com/resources/index.html).

I have users that use Outlook as their "file cabinet".. Theyll create huge numbers of new folders under "Personal Folders" and drag drop items from Inbox to these folders in Outlook. These extra folders (other than the normal folders supplied by Outlook) do comprise parts of the .pst file and add to it's size and accompanying bloat. I can harp all day about Inbox/folders - I can't get them to drag/drop the items to a Windows Explorer structure, removing them from the effects of .pst bloat.

From my standpoint, Inbox is not the only factor contributing. Still, this was a valuable article for me who has no choice but to use Outlook.

H

I found scanpst.exe in 2 seconds with "Everything". Check it out.

A tiny utility called "EnableDisable for Office" can simplify your life here.

Ever seen an Outlook installation that's slow to close because of huge open .PST files? Those cases where you close Outlook but the tray icon turns gray and remains there for up to 20 minutes while the Outlook process continues writing bytes, or those annoying 'Outlook process' messages when you close Outlook just before shutting down?

I've found these registry entries fix the problem in all of the dozens of times I've used them. Be logged on as the user, and wait for the Outlook process to completely finished first. Obviously, as with all registry changes, back it up first.

For Outlook 2007:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\PST]
"PSTNullFreeOnClose"=dword:00000000

For Outlook 2010:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\pst]
"pstnullfreeonclose"=dword:00000000

I noticed many comments here about using Google and other free alternatives to Outlook. i have yet to see any of these alternatives with the same features as Outlook. And just so everyone has not forgotten, Google and all the other "free" providers scan the content of your files and record your usage habits which is not a very good idea for business use.

They from the same class of people who post 'Use Linux' in any Windows discussion, and are convinced that moving everything to 'The Cloud' will fix all problems. Off-topic and unhelpful. Vote them down with a clear conscience.

My trouble with Google is the simple fact that "your" stuff lives on "their" servers. I have no trouble with the security of the transactions between your system and Google. I have a two fold problem with MY information being on systems not under MY control. Some companies may feel secure that Google wont simply just leech any info it finds there. They can't steal what they never had. Its not the process I distrust... its the one holding my data. The other problem I have with it. Why does their e-mail NOT support secure email (S/MIME)?

And what happens if their servers go down? Businesses can't function without Email. Look at the wankers who complain every time RIM had outages?

RIM outages are not common at all. We have blackberry devices for about a decade now and we only had issues last year when they had issues. BTW, for that IT using exchange, remember you can setup Disaster recovery pretty easy with Message One from Dell. No exchange? No problem, enable Message One and your blackberry is working again with your email even when your network infrastructure is down!. Systems going up? disable message one and you will see transparent email sync and services restore to normal operation. Users can work without issues, try to do that if you use google as your main email provider. Perhaps Message ONe is available for google mail?

This is likely off topic but the first time I have seen a group of 'Outlook experts' in discussion. What is the recommended manner for searching archived e-mail files and can the archives be saved outside of the .pst file and still allow for e-mail retrieval, permitting a reduction in the size of the .pst?

Thanks
Bruce

good for searching all your Outlook too not just archived stuff.

Archives are .PST files, so you can't save an archive outside of one. You can save individual messages as separate files (.MSG files) and they re-open as e-mail messages. Another way to reduce the size of a .PST is to save attachments as individual files and then delete the e-mail that originally delivered them. Again, it's rarely the number of e-mails that causes size problems as much as the size of the attachments.

Do you know how to see the size of each message?

In our exchange environment when MO slows down, we rename the exisitng OST so outlook will rebuild a new one.

If people are concerned about privacy then zip your files with a password, then google etc. can see your information. But if companies still want to be in the stone ages with Outlook and have IT guy's fixing it constantly, not to mention viruses that love Outlook'
And you can always download your contacts from the popular email programs to have a backup'. And how many times has Yahoo and/or Gmail gone down in the last 2 years?

Having an ISP going down is a much more likely scenario. Racking up bandwidth and cause traffic bottlenecks are yet other problems with housing your data off-site. As far as zipping up with passwords.. how many users know how to do that? How many recipients are going to tolerate having to unzip messages? Seriously, most users have a hard time even grasping the concept.

Different is not always better.

Other things that I would think of....

1. Empty the trash (I've seen users with many thousands of items in the Deleted folder).
2. After you run the updates, also defrag the hard drive, maybe that will help.
3. Assuming a multi-cored proc you could also try setting processor affinity to the executable. In these days of 6-core procs I would bet that would be a huge help. I've seen this mentioned on Jerry Pournelle's blog some time ago, and this helped his e-mail profoundly from what he's said.
4. I've heard also that indexing is a bit time-suck, wonder if disabling this somehow would help?

If you run in an environment with a lot of integrated applications (Document Management System, etc.) keeping the C:\Documents and Settings\userID\Local Settings\temp folder cleaned out when using Exchange really helps as well. Not to mention the cached files under Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files (Content.IE5, Content.Word, Content.Outlook). Outlook and Word both write files out there and if it's not kept clean, can seriously impact the speed of the OS (XP).

Especially with the Outlook 2007; I have not seen an outrageously large PST file in Outlook 2007 Setups for independent clients. I am one of those that had too many emails under Outlook 2003, and the Programme had a fit, and wanted to cut the size of the PST arbitrarily, however, I used a outlook repair tool ( which has saved me too many times). Cost me about 40 dollars. And then I went to Outlook 2007. About all I am concerned with in Archiving my 2007 local client material is the availability of the emails. So, whilst the emails collected for reasons beyond my control over several years ( truly) if I archive my emails, and then slowly whittle them down as I save the content to indexed content ( I know the Archive from an Exchange server is different, but sometimes the problems with it is too much to believe).
Anyway, thanks for great tips again Jack.

The cached Exchange mode can lead to large ost files. These can be compacted in the same way as above. Check your total folder size against the size of the OST file (which I usually find using %temp%\..\Microsoft\Outlook to reduce time to browse to it). If the OST is more than a few 100MB larger than the folder size, it can be quicker to close outlook, delete the OST and then reopen Outlook to reload the data from the server (depending on speed of network) as niko88 mentioned. I had one client with a 19GB OST file when his server data was only 2.5GB and taking 10 minutes to open Outlook. Dropped to less than 20 secs after deleting and reloading OST.

Hope this helps.

Hi,
If you are facing performance issues then it may be resultant of overlarge PST file. To avoid corruption & boost in speed, You must review your PST file size on time to time. If your PST file becomes overlarge then split it in to small manageable files.

I have used a splitter tool to split large PST file in manageable files.
To download demo of this software, Click at : http://download.stellaroutlooktools.com/StellarPhoenixPSTFileSplitter-Soho.exe

Regards
Russell Smith

Hi Jack,

Very nice Information but i read in this topic about large pst size and want to share my self experience about facing a problem related to large pst .
Due to large pst i mostly lost my mail of outlook 2007 few days ago and not understand how to split my important pst file then i search it in Google and find out about a tool which is useful for me and split my large pst file in this way i secure my important mail and my outlook also take a good speed after use of tool,you can get more information from this blog http://exchangerecovery.hubpages.com/hub/Split-PST-File-in-an-Easiest-Way

Enabling Outlook Preview and/or a Reading Plane can also drastically slow down Outlook and cause hang-ups. Best perhaps to skim read the email subject and click on the ones you want to read.
Another useful tip for most users is to cut down the clutter on the Inbox header Bar using RH Click, Customize current view, Fields and display only the ones you need, in the order you want.

Instant outlook speed demon

Not sure why no one ever mentions this, but this is the easiest way to speed up outlook, its the first thing I try and a lot of the time it works

Large PST's and numerous PST's can surely slow down Outlook.
I create a monthly archive PST in which I manually store my important read and sent emails and I delete the unimportant emails as soon as I can. At the end of the month, I disconnect the monthly archive and start a new one.
I use X1, a powerful search tool to search my closed archives. X1 allows for more granular searches and does a much faster job at it than Outlook does.
This method keeps Outlook's open ost and pst's to a minimum and helps Outlook open up pretty quickly.
Of course, if you have an email journaling tool on the network, there should be little need for user based email archiving. Users can simply delete everything they read every month and use the journaling search tool Outlook plug in to find old emails.

I checked Task Manager when I saw that tip, but Agent.exe wasn't running. I did a search, found the file in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Shoreline Communications\ShoreWare Client folder, and updated the compatibility setting there, but still no luck.

Any thoughts, anyone?

How do I speed up my OUTLOOK on my MAC ?

With ultra fast computers these days and SSDs, the size of the active .pst file will become less and less important, since computing power increases exponentially. It'll just power through the complexity.

I'm not sure I agree with your description of the server being a PST but it's not worth redescribing here. What I would note though is that the OST isn't all that different from a PST and when getting large could cause the same issue. Multiple PSTs - yes but as mentioned, only if older ones are closed. I think it's unrealistic to expect end users to remain concious of these things though.

Backing up PSTs is an interesting concept but I can't see it being manageable in a larger environment.

Why no mention of Exchange 2010 and its archive DBs? There are also 3rd party archive DB solutions.

For free PST backup tool you can use: http://www.safepstbackup.com/, it can also backup Outlook while running.

We have 200 users accessing Outlook via a few Terminal Servers. This means the mail database is "one large mass" and there are no individual PST files. Works well EXCEPT when it comes to searching. Searches are painfully slow, sometimes taken 5-10 minutes or even crashing Outlook. In addition, sometimes the results come back with "no results found" when clearly there are emails with that particular keyword.

Some things I've found that also help:
When using XP especially, keep the local user temp files cleaned up from:
C:\Documents and Settings\UserID\Local Settings\Temp
Also check:
C:\Documents and Settings\UserID\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
\Outlook and \Word folders.
(Make sure applications are closed first.)
Delete old mail profiles.
Keep your hard drive defragged and the same for your PST/OST files.

After Compacting PST and OST files, Defrag the file system containing the files. I have seen some incredible improvements by doing this, especially on older computers.

Also, Compact regularly, especially OST files. I have seen many OST files that are four times larger than they need to be.

By regularly compacting, you stop this happening and also avoid a Compact operation that could take hours.

As a general email management technique for a home user, my Inbox and folders are getting embarrassing large. I have all kinds of files stored in my email...pps, xls, doc, jpg's etc... ad nauseum.
Many of these files I do retrieve for current use, but I think I'd rather have them available OFFLINE.

I don't use Outlook, but rather Thunderbird.
If I just back up my mailbox folder to another volume, then delete the content of my folders would that be a sufficient home remedy for out of control mailboxes ? I think this way, I can continue to use the current folder structure and the email rules I have created for the past few years. Then later, I can reconnect to my backed up email folders to retrieve anything I want.

Or alternatively, for a home user, I could set up a secondary older computer with Thunderbird loaded onto it for the only purpose of standing ready to retrieve backed up mail or any other data for that matter.

Would this be a good enough strategy to use (for a home user).

Great Thanks

then what you're really missing is WAN Optimization. See the client version or the appliance from Riverbed...(Steelhead).
[FD: Riverbed employee...but astonished not to see this mentioned so far...]

That can be sorted out with a tool that can defrag individual files, and move the PSTs to the end of drive (or move them to a individual partition if a separate SSD isn't available)

Awesome tips, My Outlook would slow to the point of getting a NOT RESPONDING message and then just, after a few minutes, it would suddenly start working. I used the Scanpst to repair a file and then compacted the ost file. Now it works great.

I'm with SKDTech above, I have had to deal with 20+ GB PST's for a number of our Hosted Exchange customers. It always appears to be senior staff like directors. I worked on a directors mailbox this week and he had never deleted a single email in over 10 years... I had to remind him all his mail is auto archived anyway and politely encourage him to shrink that PST right down..