Read all the post and comments before doing anything!
As people start to use Outlook 2007, there is an alarming pattern starting to emerge regarding performance issues when receiving POP3 email. Even the smallest and most trivial of emails can take ages to download and be available, ranging from 30 seconds to minutes. During this time, Outlook and Windows can become slow to respond or become completely unresponsive, usually returning to normal when the send/receive cycle has completed.
One of the first things to try is to run the Office Diagnostics, with the hope it finds the problem and fixes it automatically. In Outlook this is easily achieved by:
Help -> Office Diagnostics
In the early days of this problem people thought the performance degradation was down to Microsoft’s implementation of the AUTH command, which seems to be missing a parameter. This omission by Microsoft is specified in RFC 1734.
Our own investigation, along with the assistance of people like Steve Foster (a Microsoft MVP), reveal this isn’t part of the performance problems as it doesn’t slow down the receiving of emails at all. We enabled logging to see what was going on with the server and it may also be worth your while putting Outlook into logging mode and inspecting if the delay is down to the server communication or whether it is down to Outlook’s processing of the email once it is received. It is easy to do this, within Outlook:
Options -> Other -> Advanced Options -> Enable logging (troubleshooting) - tick it
Accept everything to get back to Outlook’s normal windows then close down Outlook and restart. All your email send/receive sessions will be logged in a file located on your main Windows drive, which if it was the C drive would look like this:
C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Local Settings\Temp\Opmlog.log
Our typical log is shown below. The time it takes to connect, download and disconnect should be about the same time as you observe physically.
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Port: 995, Secure: SSL, SPA: no
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Finding host
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Connecting to host
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Securing connection
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Connected to host
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): +OK Hello there.
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Authorizing to server
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): [tx] AUTH
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): -ERR Invalid command.
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): [tx] USER me@myemailaddress.com
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): +OK Password required.
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): [tx] PASS *****
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): +OK logged in.
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Authorized to host
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Connected to host
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): [tx] STAT
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): +OK 0 0
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): ==== Comparing server and local blobs ====
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): ==========================================
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Do deletions: LoS: no
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): ========= No blob changes =========
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): ===================================
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Disconnecting from host
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): [tx] QUIT
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): +OK Bye-bye.
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): Disconnected from host
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): ========= No blob changes =========
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): ===================================
2007.02.17 11:39:40 POP3 (myserver.com): End execution
2007.02.17 11:39:40 Email Account Name: ReportStatus: RSF_COMPLETED, hr = 0×00000000
2007.02.17 11:39:40 Email Account Name: Synch operation completed
Untick the Enable Logging option, exit Outlook and restart to disable logging to the file.
The incorrect usage of the AUTH command has been raised with Microsoft by us. Hopefully we’ll see this syntax error being fixed in a future update / service pack.
It can be seen the whole receive cycle took less than a second, but it took another 30 seconds for the email to come into the inbox. All during this time, the hard drive light was on solidly indicating sustained disk access. Now that is a big clue to the real root cause of the problem.
More recently people have been starting to look towards the size of PST files, which are the files used to store the data and emails within Outlook. Undoubtably, the size of PST files are now affecting Outlook performance when using Outlook 2007. Microsoft have released a knowledge base article on this topic:
You may experience performance problems when you are working with items in a large .pst file or in a large .ost file in Outlook 2007
We tried splitting our 900MB PST main file into multiple smaller ones, with the biggest PST now being about 600MB, but this didn’t fix the performance issues. A small improvement was noticed but it was still taking an eternity for emails to reach the inbox.
When performing the PST management / cleanup, it is important to reduce your file size as much as possible by moving emails/folders to other PSTs, deleting whatever you don’t need and emptying the deleted items folder before compacting the older (fatter) PST files. Compacting is essential as it reclaims the free space, although it may take some time on large PST files:
File->Data File Management -> (select a PST data file) -> Settings -> Compact Now
Leo Notenboom has an excellent article on reducing the size of your PST files and performing the clean-up afterwards. He explains everything you need to know to perform this stage of the fixing attempt.
Likewise, the following suggestions were made as potential fixes by various people in the Microsoft Outlook Discussion Forum:
1. Create a new mail profile
2. Turn off various “Options” to improve performance - see below
3. Disabling plugins
4. Disable RSS sync feed - we use a separate RSS aggregator anyway
None of those fixes affected the poor performance for us.
We also uninstalled the recently installed Windows Desktop Search 3. It got installed during the set-up of Outlook 2007. It seemed to make a small different to the performance.
Still experiencing problems with Outlook 2007 we tried restarting Outlook in safe mode:
Start -> Run -> outlook /safe
Our Outlook ran much better when in safe mode! This usually indicates a configuration data corruption problem or a misbehaving add-in/plugin. In our case, it looks like a big part of the problem can be put down to file corruption when upgrading from Office (Outlook) 2003 to Office (Outlook) 2007.
Shane Keller has offered the following general solution on the Microsoft Outlook Discussion forum, which has been refined through feedback by other users as they implement it:
STEP 1: Turn off Outlook 2007 and locate each of these files in turn and rename as indicated.
For some reason, during the upgrade these four files can become corrupted - the migration from 2003 to 2007 isn’t the smoothest but not having to create all your POP3 accounts again is excellent.
1. extend.dat - you will find this file in the location | Drive Letter:\Documents and Settings\user-directory\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\extend.dat
//change it to extend.old
A user has reported that this file was the only thing that he needed to rename, so at this point try restarting Outlook normally and see if it has improved. If no difference has been made then rename the new version of the extend.dat as extend.old2 and continue on with the remaining files.
2. views.dat - may not find it most of the time
3. frmcache.dat - Drive Letter:\Documents and Settings\user-directory\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\FORMS\FRMCACHE.DAT
//change it to FRMCACHE.old
4. outcmd.dat - C:\Documents and Settings\user-directory\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outcmd.dat
//change it to OUTCMD.old
STEP 2: Restart Outlook 2007
1. Send yourself some test emails and watch the messages appear.
This made a big performance improvement to our version of Outlook 2007.
To summarise, during the fault diagnosis of Outlook 2007 we did the following:
- Created a new mail profile
- Recreated the account settings
- Imported old PST
- Created new PSTs (x5) and sorted email from the main PST into those
- Compacted the main PST
- Removed the old profile
- Uninstalled Windows Desktop Search 3
- Disabled plugins
- Turned off various options
- Renamed the Outlook configuration files outlined above
Knowing what we know now, our recommendation is to try safe mode as one of the first things in faulty finding Outlook problems. It could save you so much time and effort.
After getting Outlook 2007 working, Windows Desktop Search 3 has now been reinstalled to evaluate the overall impact on the performance issues. Initial impressions are favourable, with no noticeable impact by reinstalling and using Windows Desktop Search. It was later uninstalled again due to the system running poorly. Windows XP certainly runs smoother when Windows Desktop Search 3 is uninstalled.
It is also worth pointing out that Business Contact Manager was never installed at any time! Perhaps this is something else that needs further exploration by those still having performance issues with Outlook 2007.
Mike Bisson has posted a comment on Tim Anderson’s blog that offers a fix for Outlook 2007 performance issues when running on Vista:
Go to Programs -> Accessories and right click on command prompt and select “run as administrator”
Then type in the following:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable
Quarrel commented on a problem with Outlook rules and offered a fix involving upgrading the rules to work in the new Outlook 2007 format.
“Discovered that in Tools->Rules&Alerts->Options there is an “Upgrade Rules” option (I’d upgraded my 8Gb pst from 2003).
Upgrading my rules took about 1 second and FIXED my problems. (I had about 100 local rules)”
To summarise a further Vista issue that was pointed out by Marc, it is possible for legacy network hardware to cause issues with receiving of emails. Further, it is worth pointing out that both Vista and Longhorn Server have a new network TCPIP stack which will undoubtably break some existing network devices. Vendors are releasing new firmware and drivers to account for this redesigned network stack, hence it will be worth checking for updates for your network hardware.
Rob March commented on the nature of the steps he took to get things fixed and added another option to our list of things worth trying:
“I also did a SCANOST and SCANPST on the data files that makeup my mailbox which seemed to help too.”
Further issues and fixes with Outlook 2007 can be found HERE.
Note that Office 2007 Service Pack 1 is now available and it fixes a load of bugs and performance issues. Doesn’t make Outlook perfect by any means, but it does make enough of a difference to make it an immediate recommendation.
More solutions to the performance issues to follow as we get them. We will also be editing this posting to reflect new information and to improve suggestions for diagnosing and fixing Outlook 2007 POP email issues.
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