The results are in! Meet the top members of our 2017 Expert Awards. Congratulations to all who qualified!
it's a 4GB vista machine. is 4 GB for mailboxes so large enough? What's your view of vista : ) ?You mean 4GB of memory? I can't really comment on the performance of your computer overall without knowing more about it, but 4GB of memory is plenty for most computers. I don't see anything wrong with Vista, although many people dislike it because of some of it's more annoying quirks, it is not going to have any significant affect on the performance of Outlook.
He's got these mailboxes on a desktop also (which is also slow) and on his phone he says.That is pretty standard. The phone is either acting as an IMAP client similar to the computer, or it is downloading a copy of the mail via POP and leaving the messages on the server so that the desktop can download a copy too.
Is exchange a better answer than imap?It is certainly a more sophisticated answer and it scales much better. Sync with mobile devices is much better, and Exchange provides Calendar and Contact sync. In general, yes it is much better. On premises Exchange servers integrate with Active Directory, which is important to reduce the administrative overhead of a company with more than a handful of employees. An on premises Exchange Server is quite expensive and only appropriate for a mid-size business. Hosted exchange (e.g. Office 365) is more in the affordable realm though for individuals and tiny companies.
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?IMAP uses PST files technically, but don't think about it that way. It is strictly for caching the contents of the mailbox on the computer. You cannot have an IMAP account and a POP account share a PST file and you can't treat the PST file as any actual storage of your mailbox. Remember with IMAP the messages are stored on the server. Anything local on the computer is just a cache and should be treated as volatile.
Are you are experiencing a similar issue? Get a personalized answer when you ask a related question.
Have a better answer? Share it in a comment.
Yes, but IMAP is the preferable technology to use.
>and the PST is only 1.5GB?!
This isn't unreasonable. When Outlook is configured for IMAP, it only caches a local copy of SOME of the messages in the local PST file. By default it downloads headers, and then the full items of some of the commonly used folders. You can configure the exact behavior in Send/Receive->Send/Receive
When Outlook runs into a message where it doesn't have a locally cached copy, it will reach out to the IMAP server to download it on the fly. Then cache that information. It is not necessary for Outlook to download the entire contents of the IMAP account.
>gmail says they are using 8.4GB
>gmail / all mail 8.7 gb 8.7GB
>gmail 0 16GB
This makes sense too. Gmail "Labels" are very different from IMAP "folders" in that a single distinct message can be associated with multiple labels. The "all mail" folder contains an aggregation of all the messages in the other folders, so the total size of the root account according to IMAP is actually TWICE the size of the Google mailbox.
To help speed things up you should NOT sync the All Mail folder unless you really need it.
As for other performance issues.... it's IMAP. It's slow because it relies heavily on the Internet and most of the mail operations are synchronous. There most likely isn't anything actually wrong it's just the way the technology works. Consider just using www.gmail.com.
Regarding compacting - you shouldn't be doing this at all.