Outlook is a great product with a ton of awesome features. Unfortunately, with great power, comes great trouble. We love Microsoft Outlook, but just wish it wasn’t prone to so many bugs and crashes. Below we will discuss how you can eliminate most of these problems and get on with using your email, calendars, contacts and more.
Before we get started, it is important to learn a little bit about how Outlook functions and what causes some of the errors. Outlook keeps all of its data into a database known as a PST file. Your PST files handle everything, including: email, contacts, calendars, journals and so on. When something happens to the PST file, your whole Outlook crashes. It is all too simple for a PST file to become damaged, go missing or get deleted accidentally. As everything is stored in this database, when something happens to it, there is a real problem.
Common Outlook PST problems
Damaged PST file: A very major problem. If your Outlook PST file becomes damaged for some reason, then you won’t be able to access anything. Your complete inbox and everything associated with it is rendered useless. Outlook PST file corruption can occur for various reasons, sometimes due to disk problems, Viruses, Registry errors and so forth. The point is, once it happens, all of your important email can be gone. Fortunately there are products that can fully fix and restore Outlook PST files. One of the best is Stellar PST Repair. Stellar will fix pretty much all Outlook troubles. There is also a free product with Microsoft, called Scanpst that will occasionally work too.
Oversized PST files: If you have an oversized PST file (larger than 2GB), your email can freeze entirely. Email might seem like it’s functioning, but you won’t receive any email and there are no error message reports. This is a very annoying problem, often difficult to detect. So if you can’t get your email, but connectivity is fine, check the size of your PST file. This applies to older versions of Outlook and especially to imap accounts. If you do have an oversized PST file, you will probably need to delete email from the server to get the size down again. Use archiving to avoid this problem from happening again.
Email not working: Luckily, if you can’t send or receive, this is probably just a minor issue. The cause of this is usually incorrect details placed into the outgoing and incoming servers for your Outlook account. It is easily fixed by double checking all account settings. Be sure that you are properly connected to the internet. If this all looks good, then you probably need to check the remote server settings. From time to time, the remote server that you connect to will go down. If it is down, you can’t do much until it comes back online. At that point, all email should work fine again.
Outlook timeout problems: Outlook has a timeout setting under the advanced settings. This timeout setting specifies how long Outlook should wait when connecting to the server. Some servers are slower than others to respond, so if Outlook has a very low timeout setting, it might never make a proper connection. If you are seeing timeout errors, check the value that is set. All you need to do is increase the timeout setting to see if that fixes the problem. Generally a server will respond within a few seconds. If it has extra load, the response time may be longer, so keep your timeout setting at a good level to handle this.
I hope that helps fix some of your Outlook email issues. For a complete guide, have a look at the guide on fix all Outlook errors, it will fix all of your issues with Outlook.
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