Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Entourage email clients

We have experienced problems where a very small number of Microsoft email clients have overloading the School's email server.

It appears that the normal configuration Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Entourage, is excessively aggressive when talking to a busy IMAP server. As the server workload increases these clients make more and more connections, which overload the system. The Microsoft users don't gain any advantage from this aggressive configuration because when the server is overloaded it can't process their own or anyone else's requests.

On one occasion a single client was making at least one new connection a minute resulting in over 700 login connections a day.

Please make the following configuration changes if you must use Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express to access your email on the School of Crystallography's servers. Entourage should make similar changes.

• Adjust the server timeout slider to 5 minutes or longer
  • From the "Tools" menu select "Accounts"
    • Select the "Mail" tab
      • Then select the entry use to connect to the Crystallography IMAP server
      • Then select "properties"
        • Adjust the server timeout slider to 5 minutes or longer
• Un-tick the box marked "Check for new mail messages every"
• This is more relevant to dial-up usage, it should find new mail automatically if you have the inbox open.
  • From the "Tools" menu select "Options"
    • Select the "General" tab
      • Un-tick the box marked "Check for new mail messages every"

For more information on these problems see

• Why is one user creating huge numbers of IMAP or POP server sessions? at http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html#7.36
• http://www.faqchest.com/prgm/wuimap-l/imap-02/imap-0204/imap02040213_19518.html

$Revision: 1.1 $      $Date: 2003/12/03 20:43:30 $