Outlook just won’t give up

I received a call yesterday from another employee where I work. They were having a problem with Outlook running very slow and not sending emails. It started last Friday after they sent an email, which was still in their Outbox, to someone outside of our network. The problem turned out to be caused by an email attachment they were trying to send.

Most ISP’s or email services (i.e. GMail, Hotmail, etc.) limit the size of email attachments to between 2 and 20 MB. The attachment for the email message that was still in their Outbox was over 70 MB! The file was a TIFF they had created of a scanned page from an address book. They were not getting an error from the local Exchange server because they had created a second account in Outlook to connect to their BellSouth (now AT&T) email service. For some reason, the BellSouth SMTP server wasn’t sending back an error rejecting the message due to the file size. The server was just ignoring the request to send the email. Since there was no error from the SMTP server, Outlook kept trying to send the message.

The kicker was that Outlook was trying to use everything the PC had to send the message. I watched the Outlook process in Task Manager and the memory usage crept up from it’s normal 10 to 20 MB to almost 220 MB. The CPU usage rose to about 60%. Plus, because the message was tagged high priority, all of the other messages they tried to send were left in the queue.

Everything started working fine after I deleted the mega email. I explained why it happened, what the maximum size they should send is and that they need to use the web based email client for BellSouth instead of Outlook (at work, doesn’t matter at home). They couldn’t believe the file was that huge to begin with but didn’t notice because they just chose “Send to Email Recipient” when they scanned the page. Considering that the page was black and white with no pictures, I suggested that they scan the page to a JPEG with a lower resolution. The file size would be a lot smaller and they could compress (zip) a JPEG more than they could a TIFF.

Few of us could bear to have ourselves for neighbors. – Mignon McLaughlin

14.Aug.07 Software

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2 Responses to “Outlook just won’t give up”

Rollie | August 17th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Good old Outlook. There are more stupid bugs and things like this that don’t give warnings than just about any other Microsoft program. I can’t believe the number of times per week I end up deleting and recreating mbx files and pbx files, reinstalling Outlook, fixing corrupted files, or setting it up for users for whom it mysteriously deletes the settings.

I always point out to people how in the help menu it has that “repair” option that essentially reinstalls Outlook. After pointing that out I always ask, “now what does THAT tell you?”

Isn’t it odd that Outlook, Thunderbird, and other clients don’t automatically ZIP attachments or something? A lot of webmail services do that already.
wyckedone | August 18th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Isnâ€™t it odd that Outlook, Thunderbird, and other clients donâ€™t automatically ZIP attachments or something?

You’d think they would build that feature in. It would delay sending of the file but it would help many times with attachment size (pics, documents, etc.).