I am currently on a long train ride through Austrian alpine valleys and the network connectivity is very spotty (to say that politely - every tunnel is a dropout and there are MANY tunnels!).



This made me painfully aware, what an old-fashioned and outdated application Outlook is! The app is constantly blocking, because it is obviously trying to connect and synchronize all the time and this dinosaur doesn't do that silently in the background but obviously uses its main thread to do so! When writing and reading emails the UI is blocking every minute or so and then the app is dead for at least another minute. Occasionally one can get it back by using the task-bar utility and issue a "cancel server request" but very often that doesn't help, either. This is utterly useless and painful!

When will this be improved? We are having 2016 now and this app's design seems to stem from 1990! And even back then I was programming using multiple threads and my UIs wouldn't block because the network was down or slow! MS - this is a shame!

Will we ever see a version that will keep the UI running and responsive even when network connectivity is bad?

Click the Work Offline button on the Send and Receive tab.
As for the rest you need to ask Microsoft.

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Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
Visit my web site for more programming tips and ready made processes www.gmayor.com