23 Responses for "Outlook Slowness"

1. Katy February 19th, 2007 at 1

   Back in the days when I used Outlook I used to have no end of problems with it seemingly grinding to a halt.

   I have to admit I’m a bit of a hoarder and used to keep every email received and sent. I managed to speed outlook up quite considerably by regularly archiving items over 6 months (or so) old.

   Of course, if you want to retrieve something it becomes a pain in the backside …

2. Jtt February 20th, 2007 at 2

   I’ve been searching the internet for a week now for a solution to the slowness. Outlook 2007 literally hangs my entire system at the end of checking POP accounts. Incredibly annoying and seemingly being ignored to this point. I’m considering switching back to 2003 soon if I can’t find a fix.

3. Chris Christiansen March 15th, 2007 at 3

   Today’s enterprise users demand instant results from e-mail applications including full search capability. Performance must be better than most IM applications. —

   Outlook 2007 falls short of meeting expectations. —

   Lookout Search utility with Outlook 2003 outperforms 2007’s search speed by a wide margin. I would like to see instant search results, and clear configuration for index scheduling.

4. Michael March 15th, 2007 at 4

   I’ve had the same “slow” problem with Outlook 2003 on XP-pro when I installed IE7.

   I however did find out that it is a “incompatible bug” in loading the security-settings in outlook 2003. (start OL2003 and open options|security|click-OK fixed the problem untill OL2003 was closed!!!).

   Wierd things happen… How many have the “slow outlook” with Internet Explorer 7?

5. Michael March 15th, 2007 at 5

   … By the way I haven’t found a solution for this is the last 4 months!!!

6. Phil March 18th, 2007 at 6

   If the slowness of Outlook 2007 is such a problem why dont you try disabling things like the indexing or RSS functionality.

   Better yet, why dont you go back to Outlook 97. This will make it quicker.

   To move ahead with all of the bells and whistles for Outlook 2007 there are bound to be some initial problems, bugs and even slowness. Thats what being on the “bleeding” edge of technology is and always has been about.

   I’m sick of people ranting about the problems with Office2007 - Its a brand new package, if you dont like it dont use it, and wait for the next service pack!

7. Jason March 18th, 2007 at 7

   Phil, you won’t hear any more complaints about Outlook speed from me; I’ve moved entirely to a Mac, and I’m using Gmail for all of my email needs.

8. Allister Dartin March 18th, 2007 at 8

   Thanks for this bvlog. at least somebody is speaking up. I have a brand new dual 64 CPU PC and have only installed Office 2007 with similar slow problems. I switched my INSTANT SEARCH feature off and it seems fine now.

9. Phil March 19th, 2007 at 9

   Good to see somebody is putting their money with there mouth is Jason You are one of the few people who actually do that.

   The one thing I could also suggest with the index for Outlook2007 is to exclude the index database from your virus scanners - I have found this can slow everything down dramatically.

   Phil

10. Scott Bueffel March 19th, 2007 at 10

    One of the things that will make Outlook 2007 perform very poorly is opening an HTML with a lot of links and the sender is in your Safe Senders list. The rendering engine used by Word 2007 (instead of Outlook 2003 using IE) has a very difficult time processing the links. The links do not have to be external or refer to images. Just the presence of all the URLs in the message being analyzed to determine if they are for images to download, etc., causes Outlook to hang until the processing of the links is finished. This can take several minutes if the message has hundreds of links.

    I have an open case with MS regarding the issue and it is classified as a bug (and is reproduceable by them). I have been waiting for a buddy drop/hotfix for several months, but nothing yet.

11. Jtt March 19th, 2007 at 11

    Phil - that is a pretty ridiculous stance to take. Obviously some of the issues that are occurring are not clear to you. Yes, I believe most people expect some general slowness issues with the new release of a very powerful and upgraded product. What you do not expect is that installing Outlook 2007 will cause your entire system to hang for anywhere from 15-30 seconds when completing a Send/Receive when it worked perfectly fine in the previous version. Many of the problems people are having have solutions (which require turning off certain features) but this one particular problem apparently does not. For those spending hundreds of dollars for a product, I think the regular Joe Schmoe would not expect to have to surf the internet for hours just trying to find solutions to get the product to work correctly. That bug cost my company many hours of productivity in initially dealing with the issue and attempting to find a solution and then ultimately needing to take the time to uninstall OL2007 and go back to 2003.

12. Vlad March 20th, 2007 at 12

    If you stupid enough, to use Office 2007 on Windows XP and 512 RAM - that’s yours personal illness. I have 1 Gb ram, 2.8 Celeron AND Windows Vista at works (Exchange server, more than 300 users, big traffic, mailboxes very often reach limits 2 gb), and I have 2 Gb ram AND Windows Vista at home. I didn’t saw any slowness at all.

13. Scott Bueffel March 20th, 2007 at 13

    Coincidentally, yesterday I heard from the escalation engineer working on the HTML rendering issue with links. He said the Outlook and Word dev groups are going back and forth trying to figure out exactly what process is doing the link processing.

    I also found out why it happens. The rendering engine grabs the first 5 URLs for analysis (is there an image to download, etc.). Then it grabs the first 5 and the next 5 and does it again. Then it grabs the first 10 and the next 5. So it is redundantly processing every link. You can imagine the time it will then take to render an email with 500 links (as I get for reports).

    Scott

14. Quoted in Computerworld on Outlook slowness « J.P.C. - Jason Clarke March 20th, 2007 at 14

    [...] I actually wrote about my frustration with Outlook 2007 about a week ago on my personal blog in a post called Outlook Slowness. My complaint is weak compared to the others you referenced; I’m basically saying Outlook 2007 is mildly better than Outlook 2003, but that I’m using a faster PC so it’s not really a fair fight. [...]

15. Michael March 21st, 2007 at 15

    @#6 Phil.

    I dont disagree with you, but I was referring to Outlook 2003.
    My point is that it could be IE7 thats causing the problem with Outlook 2003 and 2007.
    (I’ll dig into the indexing/rss things if I reinstall IE7)

16. Diane March 27th, 2007 at 16

    Been experiencing a similar problem with Outlook 2003 since upgrading to IE7. Send/receive is impossibly slow eg. 30 mins to download 11 emails/236kb during last session. Have tried switching off spam filter with no marked improvement.

    Any ideas? Am using broadband connection (3.5Mbps), and laptop is a Rock XCTX with T2700, and 2Gb RAM.

17. Shane April 14th, 2007 at 17

    Outlook 2007 performance issues have been annoying me for the past month. After much searching I came across this post on the Outlook newsgroup at MS:

    http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.outlook.general&tid=44128537-a672-47d8-babb-d661c3790f4c&cat=en-us-office&lang=en&cr=US&sloc=en-us&m=1&p=1

    So far it has significantly sped up my Outlook 2007 performance. Opening Outlook as well as opening attachments is much faster.

18. Dean Lane April 25th, 2007 at 18

    Scott is right on the money with his observations. OL2007 works ok for me until I either have a message with links or attached pictures, then it stalls for quite awhile before opening up. A clean email opens instantly. Scott please keep us informed if anything materializes with MS. I’m about ready to switch back to 2003.

19. Scott Bueffel April 25th, 2007 at 19

    I haven’t heard anything since my post on March 20. I think I will ping the escalation engineer for the status. While not in a full-scale deployment, we do have more users on 2007, so I fear the issue happening to more people.

20. Dean Lane April 28th, 2007 at 20

    Something I found out since I made my post.
    I have a dual boot system still running XP Pro and also Vista Ultimate. I don’t do this very often because it screws up my rules in Outlook when I do it but my wife checked email while I was booted up in XP and checked to see how much slower Ol2007 was using XP and the same letters that took 5 to 10 seconds to open in Vista-Ol2007 opened instantly in XP-Ol2007.
    This surprised me.
    Just thought you’d like to know that.

21. John November 23rd, 2007 at 21

    I have two problems - They may be related:
    1. Outlook hangs whilst receiving pop3 mail

    Deleting the various files as outlined above - this made no difference here.

    Outlook 2007 - Clean install on Vista - Both fully ptached up to date. PST file is only about 350Mb and compressed using the built in feature.

    The hanging is clearly obvious on some messages - it does appear to do it on all messages though - so there might be merit in the thread regarding it checking various links in an email, but I checked the ones it hangs on and it only had a couple of links, so it’s not obvious what the issue is there.

    I’ve tried the idea of changing the TCP Receive window:
    From the Command prompt:
    netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

    If you do this when Vista Runs a repair it will warn that it’s been changed and want to set this back to autotuninglevel=auto (so this is easy to revert)

    To show current settings:
    netsh interface tcp show global

    It’s possble this makes a difference, but I don’;t think it’s made much for me!

    The Worst problem for me though is this:
    2. when working with attachments in a new message outlook often crashes completely and closes losing everything I’ve worked on - I always tell it to send the
    error reports to Microsoft - ARE YOU LISTENING!!!

    I believe this occurs when I add an attachment, then open the attachment from that message BEFORE I have saved the message. I think that if I save the message first then it will generally be OK afterwards.

    It’s also posisble that the hanging on send/receive is actually causing a problem with the open email process, so that if I write a long email then an auto send/receive happens this causes the problem for my attachment.

    MY PST File is in my home folder which is on a server - so not sure if that makes any difference yet.

    John

22. Reed Wiedower January 17th, 2008 at 22

    Any update, Scott? I’ve got the exact same error occurring for several of our users here…right now the only surefire way to get it to work is to disable html rendering completely.

23. Scott Bueffel January 18th, 2008 at 23

    It is officially addressed in SP1 for Office 2007. I tested it in SP1 Beta and SP1 RTM and, while it does render faster than 2007 RTM, it is nowhere near the response time of Office 2003. I was told, when I first tested with SP1 Beta and gave Microsoft my results, that the code was frozen and I would need to open a new DCR after SP1 released. I haven’t done that yet, but every time I go to open an HTML message that I know has enough links that it will cause me a problem, I am reminded. I think I will do so on Monday.