Outlook Express slow because of Message Rules

I received an interesting feedback 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 created 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 huge amount of corresondence! I didn’t have the heart to ask the exact number of message rules that were created after being informed that he had spent almost an hour on the whole excerise! 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

By default, the message rules you create in Outlook Express work only on incoming messages. All previous email remains untouched! But you can apply the rules on these messages too.

Refer image above: Open the Message Rules pop-up; go to “Tools” -> “Message Rules” -> “Mail“. Click on the “Apply Now” button which brings up another pop-up. Choose the rules and the folders (the default is Inbox). When done, close the pop-ups.

Outlook Express becomes slow when you have many message rules

As I wrote above, Outlook Express message rules by default 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 downloading process takes a longer time as each incoming email 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 and slow the downloading process.