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Tuesday 6 March 2012

Slow performance with Outlook and multiple mailboxes

We all have users who have more than one mailbox, be it for an old employee or for a project.  Sometimes when you set up a user with multiple mailboxes you will find that Outlook stops responding or becomes very slow to use.  If you work on the primary mailbox then Outlook works normally, the user is often on a high latency connection to the Exchange Server.

Well the issue is that Outlook only caches the mailbox to an OST file in cached mode for the primary mailbox, it will not do this for subsequent mailboxes so they are accessed by MAPI and that is just not going to work over a high latency connection.

What can we do?

Well to start multiple mailboxes are not really a great idea, try to talk about Distribution Groups and SharePoint as a way to collaborate, but if you have no choice then I would crate a second Outlook profile for that mailbox and make the user switch profiles, then you can have a cached mode OST for the secondary mailbox and Outlook will perform correctly.

How IT is supposed to work and how IT has to work are often two different things.

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