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Trying to understand IMAP and outlook on a SLOW Vista machine

trying to understand where the slowdown with outlook 2010 on a vista machine with 6 email accounts - 3 hosted by gmail and set as IMAP in outlook (gmail is set for imap AND POP.  is it ok to have gmail set for both?).

and 3 accounts hosted by godaddy and set as POP accounts in outlook.

account 1 on gmail:
gmail says they are using 8.4GB
The PST in outlook says:
size without folders: 0
size with folders: 1.9GB
then there's folders/subfolders listed with 2 columns size and total size.
like:
       size    total size
gmail                       0      16GB
gmail / all mail  8.7 gb     8.7GB
etc.

then local subfolders?
inbox                3.6GB        3.6GB
etc.

and the PST is only 1.5GB?!

any of that make sense?  

That's similar for all the mailboxes - weird numbers and slow performance.

compacting takes a long time / never finishes.

any advice?
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Frosty555
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Frosty:  Thanks!!!!

some other things I forgot to mention:  it's a 4GB vista machine. is 4 GB for mailboxes so large enough?

What's your view of vista : ) ?
So you like imap more than POP?  
>but IMAP is the preferable technology to use.

Exchange is similar to imap in that everything is stored on the server / some caching on the laptop, right?

He's got these mailboxes on a desktop also (which is also slow) and on his phone he says.

Is exchange a better answer than imap?

He has seperate PSTs for each IMAP and POP mail account.  are there pros / cons for a single PST? office 2010 PST max size is 50GB?  

i read about hosted exchange mailboxes that come with 25GB max folder size.  but performance suffers with that much mail, right?

thanks!
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thanks.  You say you've seen PSTs with 10 - 15 GB.  His several likely total that high.  So where would you begin to troubleshoot why the machines come to a slow crawl when outlook is open?

This is the same poor performance on both the desktop and laptop (windows 7 and vista).  So the common issue is the several large mailboxes.

I'm curious how the experts would deal with that poor performance.