[ms office - 2019] Outlook Slow / Non Responsive

[Andy2789]

Hope someone can help, as I am now scratching by head and pulling my hair out.

 

We use Outlook 2019 linked to Office 365 Exchange, we suffer from (clients in school only) with lagging, slow to open emails, send emails, moving between emails. This isn't an add-on issue (there aren't any running), we have recently upgraded to a 1Gbps Lease line and it still happens. I am testing at the moment and I am the only one here, the bandwidth isn't in use, but it lags, locks and goes 'Not Responding' or you get the donut of doom. When you are outside of school using Outlook, using the web version it doesn't happen. I have got all the Microsoft sites whitelisted into the exceptions list, so they aren't going through the proxy, the bandwidth usage in non-existent. But I can't work out what is causing it to happen, staff are used to it locking up occasionally, but now we have a new lease line I am going to struggle to justify why it is happening?

 

Outlook isn't running in Cache mode, so it's not a server latency, we are running a new Smoothwall S9 box but we still have issues - only with Outlook.

 

Anyone had this issue, any Thoughts?

[TechMonkey]

Does it happen on Outlook when used off your school internet? From home? That would narrow it down from your system to M365.

[Andy2789]

Just on school internet, at home it doesn't happen, so I can't even blame M365, its something within our config onsite in Outlook or within Smoothwall:confused:

[Boredguy]

If you press Ctrl while clicking on the Outlook icon down in the corner of the task bar, you can get the option "Test Connection Status"

You should be able to see how many request/fails there are for each connection as well as the response time to try and work out what was the issue.

[Andy2789]

Well I didn't know that was a thing - thank you kindly, will have a play with that and see what results I get!

[nwkeene]

We use Smoothwall and a thought occurred that to set your proxy to Port 801 in order to use the Smoothwall exceptions. On the Smoothwall, its under Guardian, webfilter, exceptions. You'll need to put the IP address of the machine in the 'source exception' list on the Smoothwall...

 

If the response is better, then at least it would narrow it down to a filtering issue.

 

PS... change the setting back before any 'users' get on the machine.

 

my 2p.

[Andy2789]

Thank you again, will also have a look at that - It happens on mine with enhanced access as well, but you're right that it could be something that is affecting all users through the core filtering

[bald_pig]

Run in cached mode, otherwise you'll have issues, Outlook hangs until it has a connection, meaning every time you minimize Outlook and Windows pauses the process, the connection drops and Outlook will then freeze until the connection is restored. There's probably a better solution but that's the easiest!