IMAP extremely slow with lots of mail, Outlook XP

[Matt W]

We have several users in our office using IMAP under
Outlook XP. It is fast for all but one user; this one
user has a lot of email (over 1GB) and it is painfully
slow. Marking a message as "Read" takes about 3-4 real
minutes. The email server is iMail. Neither the client
machine or the server machine are showing any CPU
activity during the pause and the server is not multi-
homed (there is a multi-homed slow email bug). Can
anyone offer any tips on how to speed up email for this
person who has a lot of email and wants to use IMAP?

 

[ryeish]

We have several users in our office using IMAP under
Outlook XP. It is fast for all but one user; this one
user has a lot of email (over 1GB) and it is painfully
slow. Marking a message as "Read" takes about 3-4 real
minutes. The email server is iMail. Neither the client
machine or the server machine are showing any CPU
activity during the pause and the server is not multi-
homed (there is a multi-homed slow email bug). Can
anyone offer any tips on how to speed up email for this
person who has a lot of email and wants to use IMAP?

Are you synchronizing all of the email? If someone has a lot of email
(I have one user with 1800 unread messages) I taught them how to
create additional folders that they can drag their messages to. I also
believe that you can have IMAP synch only the unread messages so it's
not doing through everything each time.

 

[Brian Tillman]

We have several users in our office using IMAP under
Outlook XP. It is fast for all but one user; this one
user has a lot of email (over 1GB) and it is painfully
slow. Marking a message as "Read" takes about 3-4 real
minutes. The email server is iMail. Neither the client
machine or the server machine are showing any CPU
activity during the pause and the server is not multi-
homed (there is a multi-homed slow email bug). Can
anyone offer any tips on how to speed up email for this
person who has a lot of email and wants to use IMAP?

While IMAP messages are kept on a server, there is a local PST Outlook uses
to mimic the folder structure on the server. Messages from the server can
be (are) cached locally. While I've never seen it specifically mentioned,
this PST is constrained by the size limits of all PSTs for OL 2002: 1.83 G.
Since it is well-known that performance issues can occur when PSTs exceed
approximately 1.25 Gb, I can easily see a loaded IMAP server inducing
slow-downs in Outlook, in addition to whatever performance issues the server
itself may have. Create a PST and move some of the messages to it. Then
compact the IMAP pst.