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IT4nextgen > How To > How to Optimize Microsoft Outlook Performance

How to Optimize Microsoft Outlook Performance

Last Updated January 17, 2023 By Subhash D Leave a Comment

With time as the number of emails increase in our inbox, outlook becomes sluggish in performance. The outlook software will take more time to open or takes more time to send-receive emails and sometimes you get error messages or you are unable to receive the emails at all. There are many reasons behind outlook’s poor speed and consuming more memory and system resources. I have mentioned all the possible reasons and their solutions to overcome most of the issues with Microsoft outlook 2019 or its earlier versions.

Reduce Outlook Errors

Option 1: Auto Archive

If you see on the left sidebar, there are a number of folders and Archive Folders is one of them. If you turn on the Auto-Archive, outlook will move all the old files to this archive folder. Now to turn on the auto-archive feature, navigate to the Tools tab on the top menu of outlook and then click on “Mailbox Cleanup” from the drop-down items.

screenshot showing outlook tools

Now you can see a lot many options to clean and optimize the outlook database. Here you can view the size of your complete mailbox. Moreover, you can also find the files on the basis of older files and according to the size of the file. In this option, you can manually define the size and the time period of files and accordingly take the action to either delete or move all these filtered files to another folder.

different outlook cleanup options

The next part “Auto Archive” is one of the best options to clean up the outlook data. You just need to click auto archive once and it will take care of all the data files created.

The other option this Mailbox cleanup offers is empty the deleted files since we often ignore the files stuffed in deleted Folder.

Option 2: Manage Add-ins

When you install any new software, most of these programs tend to install some add-on packages to outlook also. These programs keep on running in the background and swamp down the performance of Microsoft outlook. But you need not worry since there is an inbuilt option to either disable or remove the add-on software. To do so, you need to navigate to Tools> Trust Center> Add-ins.

outlook trust center options

In this screen, you can see a number of active add-ins. For example, in my case you can see Acrobat PDF Maker, Adobe send and track, Ginger grammar check, OneNote notes, and much more.

To delete or disable these add-ins, you need to navigate to the bottom of the dialog box. Now, click on the GO button, and on the next screen you can select the add-in that you want to remove or disable from outlook.

image showing various add on software

Option 3: RSS Feed

There are many RSS feed reader apps and programs available online like Panda, Feedly, Blog-Lovin, and much more. So why you should use Outlook as a feed reader and make it sluggish in the process? To remove the RSS feed from Outlook, navigate to tools>account settings> RSS Feeds. Now select the RSS feed and click on the remove button.

outlook account settings with various options

Similar to the RSS Feed tab, you can see another tab named Internet Calendars. When there are many more tools like Google to use internet calendars, you should not use outlook for internet calendars since it will only overload the system resources.

Option 4 Spam Emails

These days, everybody gets a lot of spam emails and often we forget to empty the spam and trash folders. So you should periodically empty both these folders to relieve the outlook of unwanted files.

Option 5: PST File size

With time, the size of the pst file is bound to increase so, you need to compress this file size, thanks to an inbuilt feature of outlook that lets you compact the size of the Outlook data (PST) file. So navigate to Tools> Account Settings>Data Files.

manage personal folders

Now select the data file and from the above menu tabs, click on settings on the next screen, and click compact now to reduce the size of the personal data file.

Reduce Outlook Resource Usage

Apart from the above mentioned rules, you can also check the anti-virus system installed in the system since it also scans all the incoming and outgoing emails so make sure the antivirus is not a resource-hungry one. I hope this article will help you enhance the speed of your outlook. If you know any other tweak to reduce the memory usage by outlook do not hesitate to post in the comments section.

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Filed Under: How To Tagged With: Microsoft Office

About Subhash D

A tech-enthusiast, Subhash is a Graduate Engineer and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. Founder of it4nextgen, he has spent more than 20 years in the IT industry.

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