2007 Outlook issue with synchronizing folders continuously

[Sandra]

Outlook 2007 keeps "synchronizing folders" continuously, which causes my
outgoing mail to get stuck in the Outbox. I have tried everything--updates,
uninstalling and re-installing, deleting all old emails to keep all folders
from being overloaded, etc.
Is there something I'm missing? I can't use Outlook now, because of the
"send" issue. I am using another mail program, but miss the other features
of Outlook.
Is anyone else having this issue?

 

[DL]

What are your send/receive settings configured to, how many minutes?
Try setting to 10 minutes
If you have an antivirus application intergrated with Outlook, uninstal it.

 

[Sandra]

What are your send/receive settings configured to, how many minutes?
Try setting to 10 minutes
If you have an antivirus application intergrated with Outlook, uninstal it.




There is no antivirus application with Outlook on my station. My settings are for 5 minutes. Is there a way to stop or "shut off" the task of synchronizing folders? That's the main problem.

 

[DL]

'Synchronising folders' is outlook performing an auto send/receive.
Adjust the setting to 10 minutes

 

[Kara A. Peterson]

I am having the same problem. My outlook will not stop synchronizing
folders. Plus, when I hit "Send/Recieve" messages on the tool bar, it will
not stop. (It will get up to 900+ tasks complete and keep going. I have to
go into my task manager & stop the program.)

I've also turned off my antivirus scanning for outgoing messages and changed
my auto send/receive from 30 minutes to 10 minutes. No go.

I notice my hard drive keeps going and my fan is working overtime, too.

 

[Sandra]

I went to the discussions under "synchronizing folders" and found, literally,
hundreds of posts regarding this issue. It seems everyone has something to
say about it, but no one has any answers. I have completely stopped using
the Outlook and use another mail program for my office. I can't stand to
hear the fan running all the time while the folders are synchronizing.

 

[DL]

It is often the case that you have to completely uninstall any anti virus
application, and or spam application in order to completely remove it from
Outlook, and if using Norton & also I believe McAfee, use the utility
available on their sites to 'completely remove'.
Untill that is done you cannot identify the cause/problem & rectify it

 

[Ronald0]

Microsoft is apparently blissfully unaware of the bazillion posts on the
subject of "OUTLOOK is Synchronizing folders" and "can't receive emails from
good accounts" -- that leaves us all floundering in the dark.

I am posting because I have seen the situation mean many things and I've
seen few messages summarizing the possibilities. The usual suspect is nothing
more than a super-long email on a slow connection to a POP3 account. Another
is a bad email message in the inbox which must be purged through an Outlook
independent mechanism such as mail2web (works for me, there are others). It
can also mean a corrupt PST file or that the PST file has exceeded its size
limit.

The message (or it's similar earlier-version manifestations like
never-ending send-receive errors, timeouts or apparent Outlook related
computer lockup) is of no value in discerning the difference among these
cases. In fact AFAIK Microsoft attributes the message only to Exchange Server
setups which most of us do not have. If Microsoft was as troubled as we (by
the floundering they induce) they might improve the indicators. Don't hold
your breath.

Today I received some 30MB to get 10MB of email. In other words some other
unknowable process was competing with Outlook for bandwidth (another Windows
weakness where the guilty process cannot be determined -- I shouldn't have
picked that auto-update option when I installed blatzfarb back in '04 -- now
I'm stuck with it 'cause I can't find it). I mention this because the
statusbar message indicated that I was receiving mail at about 1 byte/second
(i.e. 130B of 11.3MB) which brought me back into the forums. Of course it was
wrong and so was most of the advice about how to fix it other than "Wait".

Another relevant fact is that Outlook doesn't necessarily go away when
closed --especially when processing email. This can be confirmed on the
Windows Task Manager processes tab. So you might think that you've stopped
Outlook only to be misled in your troubleshooting. And be sure to ponder "PST
corruption" before choosing End Process!

Oh, and older versions of Outlook don't restart until the hidden task
terminates which oftimes never happens. Hence reboot is ofttimes added to the
confusion.

About mail2web -- A guy at my Qwest once "hinted" me to the site which is
browser-based and independent of any ISP. He said he couldn't purge the
incomplete mailbox hog that was sticking the process for me but that I could
through the service. The important difference is that it only lists the
header and allows deletion (Outlook using POP3 is mindlessly devoted to
downloading the entire content before you can see it or act on it). It
worked and now I have a back door method of previewing my mail whenever
things get confusing. The security implications are your own business -- I
decided I was not risking that much myself -- and no, I'm not affiliated,
this is not spam.

BTW: back in time I used an ISP that provided such a browser based service
of its own complete with secure login and encyption -- much better than
Qwest's backdoor solution -- perhaps yours?

About email induced "lockup". I've researched it without too much
enlightenment. Other than Outlook restart problems (above) it seems to be
excrutiating system slowness during super-long messages rather than actual
lockup. I don't see it since I switched to a faster CPU and an ISDN modem
that is USB attached. Do you suppose that the internal "Win-modem" practise
of CPU cycle stealing has anything to do with it? I'm still wondering...

So today, my trouble was merely bandwidth and a supermessage (fixed by
"wait"). Last time it was PST oversize (fixed by archiving and compacting)
and another time was PST corruption (search on scanPST for a fix). And I've
seen plenty of the functionally equivalent "stuck" system.

Hope this helps with your dilemma.

 

[David]

I was having the same problem for the last 2 days and finally tracked it down
to a bad outgoing email address. I had an email in my outbox with an invalid
outgoing address. I had typed the name of the person and let Outlook
automatically fill in the contact information from a my address book.
Unfortunately, the contact had changed or become corrupted and did not
contain an email address any longer. Why this causes Outlook to behave this
way is a mystery for Microsoft to solve and FIX!

If you have any messages in your outbox, open them and double-click on the
recipient name. If an error message box appears (Invalid EntryID or
something), then this is your problem.

 

[Klasube]

I was having the same problem for the last 2 days and finally tracked it down
to a bad outgoing email address. I had an email in my outbox with an invalid
outgoing address. I had typed the name of the person and let Outlook
automatically fill in the contact information from a my address book.
Unfortunately, the contact had changed or become corrupted and did not
contain an email address any longer. Why this causes Outlook to behave this
way is a mystery for Microsoft to solve and FIX!

If you have any messages in your outbox, open them and double-click on the
recipient name. If an error message box appears (Invalid EntryID or
something), then this is your problem.

 

[Klasube]

I had this problem and resolved it the very same way. I found email addresses
being corrupt after syncing Outlook 2007 with my iPhone.
I delete the recipients name in the stuck email, then open the contact and
delete the email address. I reenter the same email address, save and close
and add it again to the outgoing email and it works - until after another
sync with iPhone this or another email address is corrupt again. But now I
know what to do...
Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

 

[David]

I have also concluded this is a problem caused by synching my contacts with
my iPhone. I have a lot of empty contacts now that are causing me a lot of
headaches.

 

[Bquinn]

I've been reading posts and help messages about emails being stuck in the
Outlook 2007 outbox all over the Microsoft site and the web in general. Most
just deal with getting rid of the offending message. I want to find a
solution to the problem! I've spent an unbelievable amount of time dealing
with this - and it's happening more and more often.
Over the last month or so I've had some major computer problems (unrelated
to Outlook) which resulted in restoring my files from an external drive twice
and moving all my files from one computer to another. I also completely
restored my contacts from the Dell Axim v50 PDA that I use.

Your observation about bad email addresses because of loss of information in
a sync is the first one that actually makes sense in my case! Thank you for
the contribution. I can't say that I'm looking forward to going through
nearly 400 contacts though...

Microsoft, if you are listening, this issue desperately needs attention.
I've used Outlook since 2000 and love many of the features, but I'm really
close to giving up on the program and finding one that functions well
consistently (even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles).

 

[BAK]

Sandra,

Did you find any resolution to this? I am having the same issue. I can
only receive incoming emails into Outlook.

BAK

 

[drricky]

Outlook 2007 keeps "synchronizing folders" continuously, which causes my
outgoing mail to get stuck in the Outbox. I have tried everything--updates,
uninstalling and re-installing, deleting all old emails to keep all folders
from being overloaded, etc.
Is there something I'm missing? I can't use Outlook now, because of the
"send" issue. I am using another mail program, but miss the other features
of Outlook.
Is anyone else having this issue?

 

[drricky]

Outlook 2007 keeps "synchronizing folders" continuously, which causes my
outgoing mail to get stuck in the Outbox. I have tried everything--updates,
uninstalling and re-installing, deleting all old emails to keep all folders
from being overloaded, etc.
Is there something I'm missing? I can't use Outlook now, because of the
"send" issue. I am using another mail program, but miss the other features
of Outlook.
Is anyone else having this issue?

I was having the same problems. As someone else pointed out, I think it is an iPHONE problem. It all started when synchronizing my iphone with Qutlook's contact list. Somehow it is corrupting the email addresses. I erased all email addresses and entered them back in and hit save and close. Problem solved, until I synchronized my iphone again. The problem came back. Did the same procedure and fixed them again, and again it worked. Try this even if you don't have an iphone. Maybe it will work for you. It's either a Microsoft or Apple issue and I find it strange that neither is acknowledging the problem. Do they not read these posts? Can anyone inform them of the problems? I don't know whether to throw out my iphone or get Gmail.

 

[SB Mull]

I am having the same problem with constant sync and a stuck outbox. None of
the previously offered cures apply - I don't sync with any external device, I
don't have any bad e-mail addresses or any corrupt inbox messages. The only
way to get my e-mail to send is to close all the files and restart -
obviously, something happens at startup that releases the held mail, then
kicks right back in to block them. BTW, my auto send/receive hasn't worked
any of the time that I have had this problem and I sometimes don't receive
mail either (like, I will get mail 4 or 5 hours old when I restart). I have
to believe this related to an update because they problem started abou 3
weeks ago. I use Vista, Outlook 2007 and McAfee.

 

[Dev]

Try shutting down Silverlight in the security centre...worked for me

 

[BakedCentipede]

I am having the same problem. This started after I synced with my Palm Treo
750 after 9 months. I had synced with this computer earlier. One outgoing
email appeared to have a bad address. I maually retyped the email address and
the offending email did go out. I also then deleted the email address in the
offending contact and retyped the email address. BUT, the continuously
synchronizing of the folders hasn't stopped.

 

[BakedCentipede]

I started having this problems about a week back. The first symptom was that
my emails weren't going out and I continuously received the same "0x800..."
error. Researching on this error message I learned that it is caused due to
bad/corrupted outgoing email address/header! Upon manually retyping the
outgoing email address(es) the email(s) did go out, but the continuous
synchronization problem continued. I later found out that several of my
Outlook contact enteries had a corrupted email address (if I copied the email
address into memory using Ctrl-C, deleted the email address from the contact,
saved the contact, and then pasted the email address again using Ctrl-V, and
then tabbed out of this field, the email address disappeared). Even replacing
my outlook storage file using a backed up copy from before the problem
started did not help, as after Outlook started it seems the same set of
outlook contacts redeveloped the corrupted email address problem. I also
deleted the mails and contacts entirely to clear out the indexes and then
reattached previous versions of my storage folder, but the corruptions
reappeared and the continuous sync problems did not disappear. I uninstalled
and reinstalled my virus checker as well as MS Office, but the problems still
persist. Also, if this is a possible factor, I have about 3200+ contacts in
my contacts folder.