Outlook Express slow because of Message Rules
Posted on September 20, 2009 under Outlook Express | Leave a comment
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I had an interesting comment from a visitor today. He has 12 email accounts configured in the Outlook Express program. Looking for ways to organize and automatically sort the email messages, he stumbled on the Message Rules article. Overzealous with the new information, he creates tens of message rules in Outlook Express. The outcome was not something he expected – Outlook Express became very slow! To quote him:
I though the Message rules would help organize the email messages in Outlook Express. They are not so great as you tout them to be. Firstly, nothing happens to the messages that are already stored on my computer and, secondly, it just slows down Outlook Express, especially the process of downloading email.
After exchanging a few emails to get all the details, I came to know that he gets more than 300 emails per day in those 12 email accounts – and that’s a whole lot of corresondence! I didn’t have the heart to ask how many message rules he has set up after being informed that as hour has been spent on it! Assuming, a message rule can be created in a minute or less, there would be at least 60!
Outlook Express message rules work only on incoming email
First things first. The message rules you create in Outlook Express work only on incoming messages. All previous email remains untouched! This means, the only way to sort and organize the messages you already have is to work on them manually – drag-n-drop.
Outlook Express becomes slow when you have many message rules
As I wrote above, Outlook Express message rules work on incoming email. Each message is scanned and appropriate action is taken when the condition/s in a message rule are met. You can consider the message rules as a sort of filter (which they are) through which all incoming email has to pass. And when you have tens of message rules set up, Outlook Express will slow down – actually the process of downloading emails takes a longer time as each incoming message is sieved. This is especially true when your computer is kind of old, the internet connection is slow and/or there are tons of messages to be downloaded.
In conclusion: Use the message rules judiciously. Remember, too many filters will affect the functioning of Outlook Express – it will slow down… sometimes even to a crawl!
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