February 17, 2004

Help: Any Outlook 2003 Gurus Out there?

Are there any Outlook 2003 users out there that can explain why getting S/IMAP data sucks big time? Both Thunderbird and Outlook Express works awesomely fast checking mail on the same system, and never hangs. Yet Outlook seems to stall, timeout and take its frigging time. To top it off, its threading SUCKS... its not done in the background very well. When its downloading headers I cannot basically read any other mail, reducing my productivity significantly. The app just hangs until the download is done, assuming it ever finishes. Right now its been sitting saying "Send/Receive Status 98%" for over the last hour, and I can't check my mail in the folder its hung on. And this happens a LOT.

Basically its really unresponsive, slow and clunky. I can see why Chris Pirillo dropped it. Yet others say their's works great. There has to be some configuration issue here. Just not sure what. This is a brand new OS and app install. I have given it two full weeks of use, and it hasn't gotten any better (although I must admit having all my calendaring has been nice when Live Meeting events occur.) I really want to take advantage of the other features in Outlook, and can't do that if I can't even check my mail without issue.

Alternatively, does anyone know of a calendaring and contacts plugin for Thunderbird that will sync to Palm on XP? I will drop Outlook like a stone if I can get everything to work together.

Posted by SilverStr at February 17, 2004 05:10 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Thunderbird's Calendar extension can publish to a remote webdav server (Apache + mod_dav) in the vCalendar format. It seems to be the same the iCal format, which you can sync with your palm by following something like that's described here:

www.smackfu.com/stuff/programming/cal.html

Contacts for Thunderbird are stored in vCard format, so there might be a similar solution like the above. That's a total guess, and if it doesn't pan out, get an OpenLDAP server going which I know thunderbird supports out of the box. For the Palm side of things... there has to be a conduit for Palm, I can't imagine that there's not one already available.

Posted by: Ian at February 17, 2004 10:44 PM

Just found palmsync for Thunderbird, which claims to be able to sync thunderbird's address book with your palm (using hotsync).

www.thecapras.org/mcapra/ThunderbirdSync.html

My main Windows Workstation down and took my 40 gigger with it, otherwise I would be testing these options for you.


Anyone have advice for recovering data on a FAT32 40 gig drive? As soon as I found that I couldn't boot (and checked to see if I could access it from anohter machine) there's been no write access of any kind, except the MBR. I'm hoping it's still salvageble in some way, but the tools I've tried so far (testdisk, partd and fsck) are all giving me completely dififerent results, so much so that I really want another opinion on what to do. 'Cause I got one chance to get it right, otherwise I'm hooped.

Posted by: Ian at February 17, 2004 10:58 PM

http://mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

Not sure if it does syncing, but it's a calendar app for mozilla type browsers.

Posted by: Arcterex at February 18, 2004 10:48 AM

Ya I know about that calendar. Thats the one I was looking at. It uses iCal as a format, but does NOT sync with Palm. Although Iam pointed out a hack to get it to work... haven't tried it yet.

Posted by: SilverStr at February 18, 2004 11:01 AM

Hey Dana, try this(?):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;826807&Product=out2003

Posted by: Rick at February 20, 2004 12:59 PM

Hi,

I just installed Office 2003, and donwloaded the latest updates and I too am experiencing the download mail freeze unresponsiveness within outlook. I have been looking around for some fixes but I can't seem to find anything to make it work correctly. I continuously have kill the outlook process from the task manager just to take control. The intersting thing, is I also upgraded my laptop with the same software, same email accounts ( everything ) and it works fine. I have tried, removing completely ( office ) and re-installing - did this about three times already but no change. Any feedbackj would be great.

Posted by: Richard Garcia at April 21, 2004 09:32 AM

Richard,

I ended up dropping Outlook. It just wouldn't work for me. I am now using Thunderbird, and its work well. However, I really wish I had the integration with the calander and contacts :(

Posted by: SilverStr at April 21, 2004 09:41 AM

My I suggest the Palm Desktop of Palm. This software allows sysnc with your palm and interact with your contacts ans calendar.
I also have the same problems with outlook 2003. I am considering leaving it for good.

Posted by: Figueiredo at May 27, 2004 02:46 PM