2003 - time delay in message text appearing

[Dave]

hi folks,

using outlook 2003 with all the latest upgrades. often it takes up to 10
seconds for a message to appear when I click on the message link in "unread
mail". I've recently compacted my folders, but no help.

any answers?

thanks!

Dave

 

[VanguardLH]

using outlook 2003 with all the latest upgrades. often it takes up to 10
seconds for a message to appear when I click on the message link in "unread
mail". I've recently compacted my folders, but no help.

See what happens when you load Outlook in its safe mode (which doesn't
load any installed add-ons to Outlook):

outlook.exe /safe

Are these plain-text or HTML e-mails? If HTML, did you configure
Outlook to *block* external content (e.g., linked images)? If you allow
external content, web beacons can be used to determine when you open an
e-mail, how many times you opened it, your IP address, etc. It also
means an external server has to deliver that external content and it may
be slow, unresponsive, or unreachable.

 

[Dave]

thanks Vanguard; safe mode is much faster. I've disabled the features you
mentioned and it seems to help significantly.

 

[VanguardLH]

VanguardLH wrote ...

safe mode is much faster. I've disabled the features you mentioned
and it seems to help significantly.

Safe mode will be faster because the installed (and enabled) add-ons for
Outlook do not get also loaded; however, that means you lose the
functionality afforded by those add-ons. So you need to look at the
list of add-ons to determine which ones you really need or want.

I suspect blocking on external content solved your problem (you weren't
clear what you changed to get rid of the delay). You should be doing
that all the time as it represents a privacy vulnerability to let anyone
use a web beacon to see when you happen to open an HTML-formatted email.
Plus it means your host has to connect to some other other host to
retrieve that external content so responsiveness in your e-mail client
is affected by the responsiveness of the other-content site. If they're
slow then so are you. If you block the external content, a yellow
infobar will tell you about the block. If you decide that you want to
see that external content, you have a choice on a per e-mail basis
rather than defaulting to always retrieving that external content.