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My (windows 8) machine mostly connects using a metered connection, to one Exchange email account and one IMAP account. I'm using the Outlook 2016 Trial, which has a nice feature that warns me before it connects when it sees I'm on a connection I've set as "metered":
My problem is that this is all-or-nothing: I have to hit "connect anyway" almost all the time because I frequently go for days between being able to use an unmetered connection, and then it just downloads everything.
What settings can I apply that minimise data usage while allowing mail to be sent and received whenever I'm connected?
Here are a few things I've tried:
- Changing
Send / Recieve
ribbon >Download preferences
toDownload Headers
seems like a good place to start, so that message bodies and attachments are only downloaded when I choose to open an email like in webmail (there's an explanation of what the options mean here), but I'm not sure if this might mean emails aren't kept after I've downloaded them, which could increase data usage if I refer back to an email chain with attachements. - I got very confused about whether Cached Exchange Mode would cause data consumption to increase or decrease. I tried setting this to "on" while throttling it to the last week, thinking this would stop Outlook from bulk downloading hundreds of old emails unless I went searching for them (like how the Gmail android app downloads recent emails only), but it downloaded all my old emails anyway. All of the Microsoft guidance around Cached mode is written assuming unmetered connections that might be fast or slow - my issue is the amount of data used, not the speed.
I'm using Glasswire firewall to keep an eye on how much data Outlook is using, and currently it's using more than I think it needs - for example, 35mbs during a time period when I've only received around 10 emails, none with attachments larger than 500kbs.
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Could this still be relevant? I helped someone downgrade to 2010 from 2013 when he encountered this issue http://ddkonline.blogspot.be/2013/06/outlook-2013-bug-when-using-imap-beware.html
– HoD – 2015-11-06T16:22:40.847Email attachments data usage is actually about 80% more than than the stated size of the attachment. So a 500Kb attachment transfers at about 900k The encoding is mime aka base64 and all of the binary bytes are recorded as 7-bit clean ascii characters. If companies have huge graphical headers and background images on all of the internal mail, that crap is also added in to the mime encoding, and the message is sent as HTML or an even larger binary RTF blob. At one company, running a de-dupe app on the Exchange store for that stuff freed about 15% of overall space. 2k from millions of messages. – Rowan Hawkins – 2020-01-15T15:37:20.650