Outlook 2010 Slow Downloading Emails

Boozad · 16 Jul 2013

Recently I've noticed Outlook has been taking a very long time to download my emails from the server, it's probably been happening for the past two weeks or so. I've had my new rig for a month or so and it was fine when I originally installed Office 2010, just as it was on my previous two rigs. Office 2010 is installed on my SSD with the OS, anti virus software and Adobe CS2, nothing else.
I haven't made any changes to the program either, it just seemed to go really slow by its own accord for some reason. I could probably upload 6GB or more worth of photos to, say, Photobucket quicker than downloading 700KB worth of emails in Outlook, yet my download speed in 60MB and my upload speed is 3MB. All other net based stuff is fine, very low pings (pings at anywhere around 9ms), no lost packets and a stable connecttion at all times.

This isn't end of the world stuff and I'm not overly concerned if it doesn't get sorted out. I haven't spent a lot of time looking into at all (probably less than it took me to type all of this out) but thought I'd ask you guys who know this stuff inside out if you had any ideas.

Marshalhubs · 17 Jul 2013

In earlier versions of Outlook, when downloaded the mails, it only downloaded the message headers by default. But in Outlook 2010, By default, it downloads both the emails and the attachments for every folder. As the result, Outlook mailboxes larger than 1 GB may takes a long time to download their messages. This setting was changed in Outlook 2010 to allow the program to index all content and display information about the emails and attachments each contact has sent Follow these steps to change this setting to only download the message headers to speed up Outlook:

Run Outlook 2010.
Click the Send/Receive tab.
Click Send/Receive Groups and select Define Send.Receive Groups.

This will allow you to edit settings for send/receive groups.

Select All Accounts and click Edit.
Click the Download headers for subscribed folders option.
Click OK.
Click Close.

Boozad · 17 Jul 2013

I'll give it a whirl later cheers, although I'm still stumped as to why it suddenly slowed down so badly when it was working absolutely fine for nearly three years on the same settings.