How to Speed Up E-mail

If you use an e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, you may notice that over time, it might seem to get slower and slower. This is most likely due to the fact that all of those e-mails you have saved up has slowed the e-mail program down. With attachment sizes regularly topping 5 to 20MB per e-mail, it’s no surprise that this can occur. Here are some tips on keeping your e-mail nice and neat as well as speedy.

For Outlook Users

• Consider saving attachments to a folder on your desktop or inside your Documents folder. Once you do this, you should remove the attachment from the e-mail message itself to keep it slim in size.
• Consider setting up AutoArchive to where it can automatically move or delete older messages out of your main personal folders file into one called “Archive Folders”.
• You can scan through all of your e-mails for large e-mails by using Outlook’s built-in “Large Mail” search filter. This will help you identify all e-mails that are larger than a certain size. I recommend anything larger than 500KB be moved out of Outlook or deleted.
• Regularly empty your Deleted Items folder. You can set Outlook to ask you to empty it automatically every time you close it.

Outlook Express or Windows Mail Users

Consider upgrading to Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 or another program such as Mozilla Thunderbird. Outlook Express does not handle large stores of e-mails very well and can end up causing errors over time.

Webmail Users

If you use a service such as Gmail, Yahoo, MSN Hotmail, your ISPs webmail server, or others, you’re probably okay. However, some webmail accounts have limited space so it would be wise to delete large attachments from your account if you want to ensure that you can keep receiving and sending e-mails. For a great, free webmail service, I highly recommend Google’s Gmail (www.gmail.com). They offer over 7 gigabytes of storage for your e-mails and climbing. You can also set up direct POP3 or IMAP access with an e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook, for free.

I am offering a limited time remote support service to overhaul and optimize your e-mail client for $29 per PC/e-mail client*. With this service, I can:

• Perform a scan against your personal folders file to ensure it is error-free.
• Help you identify large e-mail attachments and move them out of your e-mails.
• Set up AutoArchive for you to ensure that you will always have a lean e-mail client.
• Configure other settings such as “Empty Deleted Items on Exit” and your own custom e-mail signature if desired.
• Remove unnecessary toolbars/add-ons in your e-mail client for better performance.
• Defragment and compact your e-mail files for even better performance.

* Note: This service applies to Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Windows Mail, or Outlook Express users only. If you are interested in switching your current e-mail client or webmail over to Outlook, or have any questions regarding this service, please feel free to contact me.