Windows 7: Outlook 2010 - solution - sending mails very slow and unreliable

Bought a new Windows 7 Home Premium notebook a few months ago. Bought microsoft Office Home & Business 2010, hoping that buying the newest stuff would save me lots of times on problems like this one....

Mail was fine for months, until about 2 weeks ago, sending messages from Outlook suddenly became very slow and faltering on my two IMAP / SMTP accounts.
Small messages got sent, messages of about 100K took many minutes and several attempts, and messages of a few MB never made it. Flakey errors, timeout errors, connection terminated, and so on. Result: I couldn't do my work anymore.

Tried working out solutions with my ISP and the mail hosters. Tried disabling virus and firewall. Tried changing settings. and so on. No improvement.



Then I noticed that sending large mails from my iPhone (using the same wifi network, ISP and mail settings) worked fine. Conclusion: it's in my PC.

Then I tried several times to follow advice telling me to look for hidden, faulty read receipts. I tried to find them with OutlookSpy and MDBVU software (as described in those tips) but found nothing.

After a long time searching and trying I found a tip somewhere to run SCANPST on the PST file of the accounts. Did that on both PST files for the two IMAP accounts. ScanPST told me for both PST files that there were only 'minor problems' and repairing them was 'optional'. Still I repaired the PST.
Result: problem gone!

Cost: several frustating days of not doing my work but trying to find out what is going on.So I would like to share this experience to the world so that others may spend less time on solving this problem.

And may I add my wish to Microsoft that if I spend over 200 Euro on a software package which has been in development for over 15 years, I would expect handling of the internal datafiles to be robust? And maybe Outlook could detect corruption of the PST by itself and repair it by itself? And that one of M$'s thousands of engineers might be appointed to add clearer error messages, so that one may find the solution to a problem a bit more easily?

Yours
Bart van der Ree

Hi Bart van,

Thanks for sharing your great experience with outlook. Yes, it is true that SCANPST.EXE works fine with outlook error. I would like to add that Inbox Repair Tool has ability to detect the corruption error, fix the error and repair the corrupt PST file.