Forgive me Outlook for I have sinned.
I have been using you as one of the primary communication tools that I have form your very first days. I have stayed within the 2Gb PST file limits but when I was told that Outlook 2003 can hold up to 20Gb I have rejoiced, joyed and thanked you for your kindness.
I still dreaded the old 2Gb limitation but decide to look forward for a better future. I therefore installed Outlook 2007 blindfold as I have known that each version of Outlook brings it’s own bliss and helpfulness to the world.
But oh and behold, my mail downloads prolonged. Is it thy punishment for my ever increasing in size PST? Am I guilty of not enabling “Auto Archive” and splitting my PST files?
Perhaps I was still good this year, for you have sent me a savior in the form of this fix…
Seriously now… I have discovered this fix via this post in Download Squad and the responds from Outlook’s PM was very annoying:
“Outlook wasn’t designed to be a file dump, it was meant to be a communications tool…There is that fine line, but we don’t necessarily want to optimize the software for people that store their e-mail in the same .PST file for ten years.”
While it may be true that it wasn’t designed to hold ten years of mail, this is certainly not the first or second version of Outlook. If you’ll take the accumulated usage hours of Outlook of all the people on this planet you’ll amount to thousands (if not more than that) of man years.
Do you want to tell me that all of the MS employees don’t have PST files larger than 1Gb? Do you want to tell me that after 5 years of developing Office 2007 and thousands of hours of dog fooding Outlook 2007 within Microsoft you didn’t check an average user’s PST file to see that its well beyond 500Mb? I don’t save 10 years of Email on my main PST file, mostly from the years that the PST was limited to 2Gb, but I do have 2 years and its more than 500Mb.
It’s you that decided to add RSS feeds into the PST file which means MORE information is placed inside the PST file not less. You should have seen that coming. Really.
Perhaps now is the time to chip in and help the new versions of Thunderbird (the Release Candidate for 2 looks really well) and combined with Lightning (the project to add Calendaring abilities to Thunderbird) and create a decent and usable replacement for Outlook!
Outlook 2007, you have failed me and robbed me of my productivity time while I waited for my mail to download. I’m afraid its time to pick up a fight and make sure that the best PIM software really wins.
Stop the PIM tyranny and join forces to beat the beast. Competition will make it better and we will all rejoice in reclaiming our mailbox as well as our lost Email download time.