Rules slows down Outlook -??

[JWNJ]

According to my crack IT support team the 15 active rules I have filtering my
incoming mail is the reason for Outlook's slow performance.

About a week ago Outlook staring acting very strange; as messages would drop
in or leave my personal PST, the application would lock up and not allow any
other action until the message(s) were delivered/received. As you can
imagine this is unacceptable. So after speaking with my IT support team I
have disabled all rules. To my surprise things have gotten better, but are
not 100% right. So here are my questions...

1 - will rules really impact the overall performance of Outlook

2 - what else should I check to improve performance (my PSTs are all under
1,000K in size)

Thanks. Jay

 

[Roady [MVP]]

1) Yes, but the actual impact depends more on what you are doing within the
rules; the amount of conditions, actions and exceptions etc...
2) You only have pst-files smaller than 1MB? How many do you have then?
Moving messages with rules to different pst-files causes a lot of overhead
as the message is written again (in the new pst-file) and then deleted from
the original pst-file. Having a lot of pst-files connected to Outlook also
could slow down Outlook.

In addition to the above you should sort your rules and use the "stop
processing more rules" action accordingly to prevent execution of rules that
no longer apply. For instance; once a certain message has been moved
already.

Aside from Outlook, 3rd party addins can also heavily slow down Outlook.

 

[VanguardLH]

According to my crack IT support team the 15 active rules I have filtering my
incoming mail is the reason for Outlook's slow performance.

About a week ago Outlook staring acting very strange; as messages would drop
in or leave my personal PST, the application would lock up and not allow any
other action until the message(s) were delivered/received. As you can
imagine this is unacceptable. So after speaking with my IT support team I
have disabled all rules. To my surprise things have gotten better, but are
not 100% right. So here are my questions...

1 - will rules really impact the overall performance of Outlook

2 - what else should I check to improve performance (my PSTs are all under
1,000K in size)

Thanks. Jay

Say the rule checks for a thousand separate words from your rule to see
if they are somewhere in the body of your e-mail. Assuming random
dispersal of words in an e-mail, the rules would have to search through
half of the e-mail to find the first word (since the rule OR's the words
to find the first one). You don't think it takes time to interrogate
the body of your e-mails looking for those words? The more rules you
have, especially those that have to digging into the body of the e-mail,
means the longer it takes for all your rules to test against all your
e-mails.

You're in a cash-only checkout line. You don't think the line wouldn't
slowdown if the cashier inspected every bill against a battery of
anti-counterfeiting tests and inspected every coin seeing if any were
valuable and they wanted to keep (and replace with a non-valuable coin)?
Interrogation takes time.

That effect also applies to anything else that interrogates your e-mail
traffic, including anti-virus software, anti-spam software, etc. If it
checks your traffic, it impacts when it gets delivered.

You can get traffic only as fast as it is delivered. If the mail server
is sending bytes at a slower rate then it takes longer for you to get
your mails. If the network is busy, more hosts are competing to get
their bytes through the same-size pipe. More conflicts with which host
gets some traffic means they get less bytes per second. You can't push
more bytes through the pipe than the pipe can handle, just like a crowd
trying to push through a door won't all get through at once so some have
to wait.

If your .pst files (you have multiples of them?) are under 1MB in size,
you sure there are ANY e-mails in them? You sure you didn't mean 1000M
instead of 1000K?