Large mailbox in Outlook 2007 takes ages to index

4

In our company each user has a single mailbox and all email they have ever sent/received is in that mailbox. We don't do archiving to PST and we thought that was the way forward. The problem we now have is if someone switches to another PC for the day and opens Outlook, it has to download all emails first to that PC (cached mode) but even then when they try to search for something, Outlook says items are still being indexed. One user has over 100,000 items to be indexed and it's been saying that for about a week!

As a temporary workaround I have turned off instant searching which allows them to search for anything, but it takes time to filter through, and Outlook doesn't exactly indicate if it's still searching for something, so in most cases the user thinks the search isn't working when really it is and it's just taking time to populate the results.

I need a solution that allows the mailbox to be indexed really quickly if the user has to login to another PC. Are we best using Online Mode instead of Cached Mode or is there another way around this?

Reado

Posted 2012-10-09T08:44:48.537

Reputation: 421

Don't use cached mode if someone "switches to another PC for the day" - that is simply not what it is intended for. Cached mode enable me to get access to my emails even when I am offline from the server eg on a laptop (or if you have a flaky network connection, perhaps). It is also useful for providing indexing for faster searches, but for one day I don't think you are helping them by trying to rebuild this index. – AdamV – 2012-10-09T11:42:08.370

Answers

0

Another approach would be to reduce the cache size. Outlook enables you to cache the mail based on days, weeks or months. If you reduce that to give them the last 6 or 12 months of email, downloading and indexing should be WAY faster than what you currently are doing. If they need any mail prior to that, it would still be in their account, they could access it through the web interface (i.e. Outlook Web Access), or change the setting temporarily so that it downloads it all.

i.e., for the company I work at, the policy is 1 year cache, and the rest is archived.

Luis Alberto Barandiaran

Posted 2012-10-09T08:44:48.537

Reputation: 225