Am I stretching Outlook 2000 to the limit....

[murrayw]

Hi,

I have an Exchange 2000 environment, alot of mail boxes are quite large.

One user has alot of problems with Outlook 2000 (fully service packed). Outlook keeps freezing and crashing. The user keeps having to close and reopen outlook.

They open 12 Mailboxes in Outlook including their own, none of the mailboxes are available offline.

Mailbox1: 1.3gb
Mailbox2: 250mb
Mailbox3: 2gb
Mailbox4: 4mb
Mailbox5: 18mb
Mailbox6: 21mb
Mailbox7: 4mb
Mailbox8: 3mb
Mailbox9: 134mb
Mailbox10: 395mb
Mailbox11: 2.7gb
Mailbox12: 1.2gb (users own)

Approx 8gb of mail in total.

The is plenty of memory and the processor does not seem to be overloaded.

Is my problem related to either the number of mailboxes open OR the amount of mail that is being opened by Outlook?

Any ideas would be helpfull?

Regards,

Murray

 

[SnoopFrogg]

For what it's worth, I have a user with a 2.4GB mailbox and we have had no problem with it. I am running Exchange 2003, though.

For those who are curious, the reasons for him having such a big mailbox are political. Gotta love politics

[purple]
SnoopFrogg
MCSA+Security - Windows Server 2003
[/purple]

 

[GWilsonRFK]

Yes. This is absolutely an issue. You are trying to load 8 gig of email from an exchange server. That is alot of email to have to pull up unfortunately. I would first suggest going through these mailboxes and possinly making .pst files. Just to make sure it is not the application, run detect and repair from the help option at the top of the screen. I would also try recreating the profile and renaming the .ost file to something else so it is forced to create a new ost. Outlook may just need to be reinstalled.

Greg Wilson
RFK Technologies
866 837 1007

http://www.rfktechnologies.com

"What an Information Technology Business Partner Should Be

 

[murrayw]

I cannot do this because the user actually needs access to the mailboxes (they are other users mailboxes).

I have already reinstalled Outlook on a couple of occasions and this has not helped.

Would upgrading to Outlook 2003 help with this issue and why?

 

[dkediger]

I've had users with multiple mailboxes before (not that number) and haven't really seen that problem.

Outlook isn't really downloading all that mail, it's only receiving the header info and some body text when the item is previewed.

That would bring up one thing to check - are the mailboxes all "open" - not collapsed in the folder views and is preview mode on. I would simplifiy the visual presentation of mail items as much as I could.

Make sure your DNS/AD integration is up to snuff. There's a lot of verification going on when alternate mailboxes are opened.

You could also test the user's environment by creating the profile on another machine and see what happens. If the problem follows, that would indicate an Outlook/Exchange issue. If not, then I would start considering a full reload of the user's machine.

Outlook 2003 is a better animal than 2000, but real enhancements under the hood are pretty much only realized when working with Exchange 2003. It still would be worth it to try before doing a full reload of the workstation.

 

[murrayw]

So far I have migrated the mail to a new mail box and the user has changed PCs twice in the last 6 months - and the problem is still there.

I have removed 5 of the mail boxes from the exchange profile.