Thanks for your reply. I hadn't consider automatic send and receive. That should working theory. Certainly would for pop3 and IMAP accounts,

What are the downsides of constantly being offline when using an exchange environment? Are there things exchange does in the online environment that would not happen and thus cause problems, if I never went on online?

I imagine I would have to live with being nagged to go on line every time I started Outlook but that might be a small price to pay for the flexibility I desire.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about Exchange other than I have no need for it, so I don't use it. Mine is strictly a one-computer home environment.

I am curious, though, about "being offline". Although I'm an old programmer, I'm still naive enough to think that anything you need to receive will wait until you go online and it will come streaming in.

I'm also confused about "going online every time I started Outlook". It may be just terminology, but don't you consider being online as being connected to the internet? If that's your meaning, I'm online practically all the time, but Outlook may be closed. When I open Outlook (and if I have the parameter set to do an automatic send/receive when I open) all the mail waiting for me comes tumbling down.

Outlook has two modes, Offline and online. This is nothing to do with the Internet. Purely whether Outlook is in online mode or offline mode. You can switch to offline mode when Outlook is running but if you are using exchange, you can't then switch back to online mode without restarting Outlook itself. So every time I need to go online I had to restart the program.

That seems rather short-sighted but then this is Microsoft and I don't have a high opinion of their software, usually finding other companies have done it better. However Microsoft have the largest share of the market, so it's there Office software I am currently using at work.

It gets even worse than this though. When I am in offline mode I cannot see any of the folders I have created in Exchange. Now I sort my e-mail into folders. I don't see anything wrong with doing that but because they are on the exchange server I can't access them without going online which I cannot do without restarting Outlook.

Whilst it is quite easy to restart Outlook, I should have to deal with all this extra rubbish just because Microsoft insist that I must be bombarded with e-mails notifications every time they come in or I must never be notified ever in my entire life. It's either or with them. Why can't they be more flexible? It can't be that hard for them can it?

I set up an automatic send and receive to run every 30 minutes. I am not 100% certain if it is working but it probably is. I still need to keep using it for a longer period to be certain. Nothing seems to be ever certain when it's made by Microsoft.

Perhaps they have changed. Although at a demonstration of some non Microsoft software recently, the person demoing wasn't very complimentary about Powerpoint 2013. So may be they haven't.

I have now found the settings that allow me to add the folders so they are available offline. Have to do this for each folder in turn and they only seemed to sync for the first time, when I closed Outlook. However they are now present in offline mode

Still testing whether send and receive works.

Oh, that offline/online!

As I said in previous replies, I knew your problem sounded too simple, and I don't know anything about Exchange.

I'm sorry I couldn't be more helpful. Good luck!

My work around appears to be work now. Send and receive runs once every 90 minutes.

Interestingly, now that I had gone off line, every time I start it asks me if I wish to go online. Once I go online, it still asks me next time I start up if I wish to go online. I cannot find an option to change this behavior. Yet more rubbish software design from Microsoft.

If it was a Mac I was using at work and I was using Mail, then I could just use an add on which would do a far better job than anything I've ever come across from Microsoft and their Outlook software.

However Mail has other problems all of it's own, so I no longer use Mail at home and couldn't be certain it would scale well in a multi-user mail server type environment, in which the company I work for operates. I reverted to using Thundebird at home, which to be fair isn't that great either for my needs but what I'm using for now.