Outlook 2007Just ran across a patch (KB933493) that was released a few days ago that aims to address many of the performance problems with Outlook 2007. I’ve installed it and have been using it for a little bit now and things do seem significantly better–especially startup time. I’ve got peers at work though who’ve been running into some serious perf issues (I’ve luckily somehow avoided them) and I’m curious to see if this patch addresses their problems as well but I imagine this is a good thing for everyone to give a shot. You can find an article on the update here and the download the actual update from here.

Related to Outlook but a different topic, I’ve been struggling with a problem with Outlook for the last week at work. My mailbox had reached its size limit and I couldn’t get Outlook to archive my old mail into my archive PST. I had many other bigger problems at work so I never dedicated too much time to this so I worked around it by deleting messages manually to enable myself to get any new incoming mail and to let my outgoing mail get on its way (when you reach the limit, everything basically freezes as far as incoming/outgoing mail go). I eventually got some time on Friday to really try to figure it out and it’s fixed now.

It turns out that Outlook’s archive feature archives against a message’s “Last Modified” date and not the send/receive date. When you think about that it seems reasonable but I didn’t think that had anything to do with my problem. I was wrong though. Whenever I ask Outlook to archive, it would quickly scan through the folders and claim the archive was complete–no errors, no warning, just success. It turns out that every single one of my messages were “last modified” on 4/4 which was later than the date I was asking it to archive. I didn’t touch these messages but it seems something happened on the Exchange server side (just guessing) that touched every single one of my messages. I had to manually archive my messages this time (i.e., sort each folder by date and drag all messages into my PST folders) but I should be good next time I get to a full mailbox state.