Hi there



Until recently I had been using notifications in Outlook 2007. However it is bombarding me with too many e-mails every 5 minutes and distracting me.

I am aware there is no way of allowing notifications to only appear at set times. The same applies to desktop alerts. It's either you must have everything as soon as possible or we will allow you to have nothing.

Perhaps Microsoft doesn't do flexible working or may be there is away I have missed.

I then tried going into offline mode and seeing if I could use the send/receive function. However I could not find away to set send and receive to run at set intervals. I need this because if I don't, I will forget to check my e-mails from time to time, which I do need to do, despite not wanting notifications every moment a new e-mail arrives. I did come across a VBA timer script but I couldn't get it to work as my VBA knowledge is too basic and I don't have days to spend learning it.

The other problem is that at work we use an exchange server and the only way I'm allowed back online is to restart Outlook 2007. Wonderful. Again not very flexible from Microsoft. To be fair I was only trying offline mode to get around my above problems so there could be good reasons for not allowing users to go back online without restarting.

I'm aware one can press F9 to bring up the send/receive but the problem I have with that is that it conflicts with another program I use, ClaroRead Pro, and the company have told me there isn't enough interest from other users in offering customised shortcut keys so they have no plans to offer it.

I also came across a send/receive all script but it only got as far as opening the menu. Not sure why but it might be because I was in offline mode. My VBA skills are too limited to look into it further.

So if anyone has any helpful suggestions then please reply. If you answer is your asking for the impossible then also reply because it would be useful to know if I'm demanding too much from a Microsoft produced product.

Thanks for reading

This is too simple-sounding, so I'm obviously overlooking something in your question. What about setting the frequency of your automatic send-receive from five minutes to a longer period of time, say 15?

Edit: I just checked it out. While in Outlook, go to Tools > Send/Receive > Send/Receive Settings > Define Send/Receive Groups, then check and set Schedule an automatic Send/Receive every ___ minutes.

Better yet: While in Outlook, Control-Alt-S takes you there directly.

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.