Over time, Outlook can get increasingly slow. Why? The more you use Outlook, the more your inbox andfolders grow. If you have ever saved more outlook folders, or pst files in geek speak, your Outlook has to constantly work on opening these .pst or archive folders every time you open Outlook. This lead in here is getting to the whole way of how you can fix your slow Outlook.
How can you fix your slow Outlook:
- Make sure your .pst / archive / folders don’t grow too big. Add more outlook folders and spread out your emails evenly among them. This will guard against corruption and data loss. For Outlook 2003 /2007,you can add a new folder, by File->New->Outlook Data File. On Outlook 2010 support, go to Home->New Items->More Items->Outlook Data File
- Remove any add-ins that are loaded. The only useful one is Windows search, allowing you to search your emails and archives. The rest slow down the works. You can find your add-ins within the Tools->Trust Center folder
- Ease your email protection. Sometimes, your antispam blocker could go bananas, taking a while to sift through all emails. Go into its spam settings to lessen its Fort Knox-like security protection.
As always, always make sure to have a good email backup if you’re saving your Outlook emails to your computer. If you are setup via imap, which is the recommended approach, your emails are automatically saving online i.e. gmail, hotmail, etc. If you have pop3 setup, that means your emails are saving to your computer which is fine as long as you have an external hard drive backup or otherwise.
