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Reducing Outlook downloads when there's limited Internet

An Office Watch friend is about to visit Cuba and emailed with an interesting Outlook problem that travellers might have anywhere in the world.

The problem is limited Internet access.  In Cuba the speeds may be slow and connection erratic.  It’s an issue Peter has struck in many places across the world plus on cruise ships with shared/expensive satellite connections.

With a slow connection, you want Outlook to grab messages quickly and not get bogged down with larger emails.

How to stop Outlook from downloading large emails, usually ones with large attachments?

Happily, there is a solution built into Outlook for Exchange Server and IMAP connections.  It’s possible to stop Outlook from downloading larger emails, unless you specifically tell it.

It’s in the Send/Receive Groups part of Outlook.  These are setup by Outlook automatically when you add/remove a mail account but can be tweaked to suit your needs.

You could create a special Send/receive group for travelling or just edit the default profile.  We just edit the All Accounts group.

Look at the Folder options for each Inbox in your Outlook profile.

Either choose ‘Download headers only’  or get all email except those with large attachments.

You could go ‘the whole hog’ and choose ‘Download headers only’ but that’s usually not necessary.  By the time you’ve downloaded headers, selected the ones you want and then fetched them, Outlook could have downloaded all the small messages.

We choose ‘Download only headers for items larger than 75kb’.  The Microsoft default of 50kb is a little too low for modern emails.  Most messages are less than 75kb.  Office Watch newsletters are below that limit.

Larger messages that aren’t fully downloaded will show up as headers in the Outlook Inbox.  You can select any large messages you want to download manually and Outlook will download them during the next connection.

The other large messages will stay on the server until you return to high-speed internet.  At that point, switch the send/receive group to normal and any backlog of large messages will download to Outlook automatically.  The ‘normal’ setting is ‘Download complete item including attachments’ with the size limit unchecked.

If you wish, also deselect some folders (like Sent Items, Drafts etc.) that don’t need to be synchronized while you’re on the road.

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