We are currently having issues with our company's Exchange server. It is only reachable from inside the company network (or when using a VPN) but not from "outside". While this is actually another story it leads me to my question:
Outlook tries to connect to the exchange server every few minutes and - while one would think that in 2015 applications are designed and programmed multi-threaded, so that one can continue working unhindered in Outlooks GUI during such periods, this dinosaur is obviously still single threaded and the GUI blocks and gets non-responsive while outlook is trying to connect to the Exchange server!

One can sometimes shorten the waiting time by right-clicking on Outlooks taskbar icon and selecting "cancel server request" but not only is this most tedious, in about 50% of the cases it also doesn't seem to have the desired effect. It is sometimes shorter to kill Outlook via the Task manager and restart it than to wait until finally some timeout strikes and it returns to serving the GUI. But, doing this one of course looses whatever one has been working on, so, e.g. if one has just been writing on some still unsaved email this option is not such a good idea.

It's really a shame that MS programs their flagship so old-fashioned that the GUI gets non-responsive if a mail server does not respond in due time!
What can one do to stop this nuisance and prevent Outlook's GUI from blocking so frequently? Can one shorten the timeout it allows for server connections, so that the GUI at least returns after at most, say, 10 seconds and not only after 60-90 seconds? Any ideas or hints?

M.