Solutions for Typical Outlook Issues

Microsoft Outlook is one of the most popular email clients and is used by businesses around the world. However, the annual increase in both sent and received email volumes leads to typical Outlook issues such as full mailboxes or slow client response times, which pose real challenges for both users and administrators.

In this blog post, we explain why overcoming these issues is important and show you some easy ways to do exactly that.

Overview: Typical Outlook Issues

Outlook issues can be numerous and varied, affecting the performance of the email client regardless of the underlying email system (e.g., Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft 365, MDaemon email server, etc.). The following problems may occur:

• Outlook is slow to respond or occasionally freezes.
• Corrupted PST files prevent Outlook from launching properly.
• If a mailbox's storage capacity is not exceeded (i.e., the quota has not been exceeded), Outlook does not allow users to send or receive new emails until they delete old emails. This can cause problems in areas such as compatibility, business continuity, and information management.
• If Outlook's performance has dropped, searching for old entries in your mailbox can take an unnecessary amount of time.
• IT administrators are often forced to resolve issues related to corrupted or hard-to-find PST files on local or remote users' computers.

For example, a customer's IT administrator said the following about Outlook-related issues:

"Most of the tickets I deal with daily are related to Outlook issues in the department. For example, it often happens that Outlook does not synchronize incoming emails or restarts itself every few minutes. And when old emails need to be restored, my team is usually forced to deal with corrupted or spread out PST files across several colleagues' computers. Our hands are full with these routine tasks, and as a result, we often have to put off more important projects."

These types of issues are quite common in Microsoft Outlook, even though it is a very popular, reliable, and versatile email client.

What Is the Basic Cause of These Outlook Issues?

The cause of these issues is usually simple: full mailboxes. Microsoft does indeed offer important email mailboxes with several gigabytes of data to its customers as a general cloud provider (Microsoft 365 mailboxes have storage capacities of at least 50 GB and up to 100 GB depending on the plan). However, most users habitually keep emails in their mailboxes for a long time, and eventually the space runs out. This is also applicable to apparently unlimited storage offered by various general cloud providers.

In addition, a large volume of emails can significantly degrade Outlook's performance. Moreover, PST files are known to cause problems when they reach a certain size. A damaged (corrupted) PST file can prevent Outlook from starting.

How Can I Solve These Outlook Issues?

If you want to optimize the performance of your Outlook installation, you should try to reduce the volume of data stored in users' mailboxes (note: especially file attachments can quickly fill up mailbox limits). However, given the legal regulations and comprehensive compliance requirements, it is not a good idea to start deleting emails. Instead, you should archive your emails.

In essence, you have two options:

• Local archiving options provided by Microsoft for Outlook or Exchange Server and Exchange Online. If you use an email system from another manufacturer, they may also offer local archiving options (sometimes as an extra paid service). An example of this is the Google Apps Vault, which is the archiving tool for Google Workspace (formerly known as Google G Suite).
• Email archiving solutions from a specialized third-party provider.

What Options Does Microsoft Offer for Email Archiving?

Microsoft offers various archiving functions that must be manually configured for customers using Outlook, Exchange Server, and Microsoft 365 or Exchange Online. These include:

PST Archiving

Users can move emails to PST files and store them locally on their computers or in the cloud. However, PST files themselves can cause various problems: they are prone to corruption, difficult to back up, and require IT administrators to spend a significant amount of time and effort.

Archive Button

This button allows Outlook users to move emails from their mailboxes to an archive folder. However, the Archive Button cannot meet a company's professional archiving needs. Although it is named archiving, in reality, the only function is to move emails into a separate folder, meaning that messages are not moved to a secure and independent archive. As a result, what users do is simply spread out the emails into various folders rather than reducing the overall volume of emails.

Archiving without Exchange Online

Microsoft 365 provides an archive mailbox, which is a separate storage capacity where emails can be moved. A similar feature is available for users of the internal Microsoft Exchange Server. This archive mailbox must be set up by an administrator. However, this type of archiving can impose a significant additional burden on the IT infrastructure and may be a challenge, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. Compared to archiving with Exchange Online or a third-party solution, email storage options here can be quite limited. Furthermore, meeting compliance requirements may be difficult, as it is merely an extension of the existing mailbox storage capacity.

Archiving with Exchange Online

Microsoft 365 users are provided with an online archive that appears as a separate mailbox in the left pane of Outlook. Administrators can apply their own archiving and retention policies. You can use the mailbox to store old emails over time and keep your primary Outlook mailbox size manageable. However, this feature is only available in certain Microsoft 365 plans and may need to be added as a paid service.

Why Are Microsoft's Local Archiving Features Not Sufficient?

Upon closer examination, Microsoft's local archiving features in their email solutions show weaknesses and this is not limited to PST Archiving and the Archive Button. Generally, managing an In-Situ archive and Exchange Online archiving requires a longer period of acclimation for the IT administrator than it would be with a third-party solution.

In addition, if a company using Microsoft 365 has branches in different international locations, issues may arise in the areas of data privacy, compliance, and legal certainty (I won't even mention issues related to data sovereignty and data location).

If you consider archiving your emails only with the local functions provided by Microsoft, you should be aware that your archive will not be independent of the underlying email system. Therefore, you would be violating the well-known best practice known as the 3-2-1 rule, which requires a company to keep three copies of its data: one locally, another in a remote location, and one offsite. For example, one copy could be stored on Outlook (the email server), another in a local backup and archiving solution, and the third stored in the cloud or as an offsite backup.

If you use only the local options provided by Outlook for archiving, it would be difficult to follow the 3-2-1 rule. For example, the local functions of Microsoft 365 use the platform itself to store data. Therefore, if the email server locks up or your Microsoft 365 instance fails, the data becomes inaccessible during the outage period. And if emails are maliciously or accidentally deleted or damaged on the platform, they can be permanently lost. For this reason, market research institute Osterman Research recommends using an independent software or a suitable managed service to protect Microsoft 365 data.

What Advantages Does a Professional Email Archiving Solution Offer to Outlook Users?

A professional email archiving solution from an expert provider can increase the performance of Outlook. Using an independent archive makes it easier for you to comply with the 3-2-1 rule. This flexibility is especially important for users of cloud-based email services like Microsoft 365. Given how important this communication channel is, the original data, backups, and archives should not all rely on a single platform.

In addition, your business can continue to benefit from other advantages offered by a third-party solution:

Email Compliance

A robust email archiving solution enables businesses to centrally protect their emails and ensures that they can be used and retained for many years, especially if you have defined email retention policies. Additionally, there are sectors that are subject to more regulations than others, particularly if they handle sensitive personal information (PII). The increasing importance of data privacy regulations adds complexity to this. In particular, in the US (but not only), emails are rarely a scenario that is uncommon in e-Discovery processes during litigation. You should consider whether your chosen email archiving solution comes with the necessary features to support your individual compliance needs.

Protection Against Data Loss

Whether accidentally or intentionally, if an employee deletes critical emails for business purposes, data loss usually causes problems in other areas. With the help of an email archiving solution, you can store copies of all current messages and all emails that you will send or receive in the future, even before they are delivered.

Reduced Workload in Your IT Department

With an archiving solution, you can reduce the effort and cost burden on your IT department when managing emails. On the one hand, your IT team no longer has to manually retrieve emails from backups or email servers. On the other hand, obtaining emails externally can significantly reduce your storage requirements. This also renders PST files obsolete in the long run.

Increase Productivity

An archiving solution significantly increases the speed of accessing information stored in emails, thereby increasing individual user productivity. For example, users of our MailStore Server email archiving solution can access their archives via a self-service function, quickly find emails using a full-text search tool, and retrieve these emails without needing assistance from the IT department. The mailbox quota becomes obsolete; in addition, reducing the volume of emails in your mailbox can increase the performance of your Outlook client.

Incidentally, deploying an email archiving software does not necessarily require a complex transition process. With our own software, MailStore Server, users can continue to access their emails and traditional folder structures seamlessly through seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook. Content from email sources outside of Microsoft can also be stored in the same archive, which helps reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining important business records.

MailStore Outlook Add-in

Our Outlook add-in is a simple tool that allows Outlook users to access email archives in MailStore Server. Depending on how MailStore Server is configured, this Web Access, an integrated IMAP server, and the MailStore Client can also be used. The latest version of the add-in can be downloaded from our website. For information on how to install and use the add-in, please visit our Online Help or this blog article.

Conclusions

If you want to improve the performance of Microsoft Outlook, you should try to reduce the volume of data stored in your employees' mailboxes. However, deleting emails may be risky due to legal regulations and compliance requirements and could lead to serious issues. It makes more sense to store emails permanently in a separate archive.

In addition to the previously mentioned limitations, and depending on your needs and company processes, the local options provided by Microsoft in Outlook, Exchange Server, and Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online products may not be sufficient to manage this task. For this reason, we recommend that you examine whether an independent email archiving solution from an expert provider would be a more suitable and stronger option for your company.

Were you aware of these difficulties? Are you looking for a suitable solution? Or would you like to take early action to prevent these issues from occurring in the future? If so, why not test MailStore Server with our free 30-day trial license without any obligation?

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the Automatic Archive feature in Outlook do?

The Automatic Archive is an Outlook feature that allows you to automatically transfer emails to a PST file for storage on your computer's hard drive.

What does the Archive button in Outlook do?

The Archive Button allows Outlook users to move emails from their mailboxes into a separate archive folder within the mailbox.

What is Exchange Online Archive (EOA)?

In some Microsoft 365 plans, users are provided with an online archive as a separate mailbox in Outlook to allow for long-term storage of old emails, helping manage the size of your primary Outlook mailbox.

What is the 3-2-1 rule?

The 3-2-1 rule states that ideally, you should have three copies of your files, using two different storage environments, and keep one copy separate from the primary system to ensure reliable backups.

Source: Solving Typical Microsoft Outlook Issues (mailstore.com)