I have four mailboxes on my Exchange server that take forever to manage. They don't belong to any single person. Two of them are conference room booking boxes and two are email accounts I use for special marketing mailings. The conference room accounts just have a lot of calendar dates, but nothing crazy: around 900 items each / 15MB or so. The other two mailboxes get a lot of bounces and out-of-office replies, but again do not have more items then a regular email box. Just deleting 30 messages in one can take twenty minutes. While trying to manage these mailboxes, I get "Outlook is trying to retrieve data from the Microsoft Exchange Server" popups. I set up a primary profile to log into them on a seperate computer and building an .ost file for any of them literally takes hours. If I open them as a secondary mailbox, it still takes forever to deal with anything. If you try to view the shared calendars for conference room MBs, it usually crashes Outlook. I have other "utility" mailboxes that we use for stuff and do not see these issues. I have a total of 70 mailboxes. People's primary mailboxes seem fine, but even when I try to treat these as primaries, they're still crazy slow.

Why are you bothering to build an OST file? Just configure them live by deselecting cached mode. Another option would be to use OWA to manage them. I only tend to see problems like this with very large number of items (5000 plus) so my instinct is third party interference. OWA would show whether that was the case on the workstation, if the problem is still there then it is something server side. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP. http://blog.sembee.co.uk , http://exbpa.com/

If I don't build an OST file, I select 10 items and have to wait 20 minutes for them to download. This happens in OWA as well. At least with an OST I can just let the messages eventually "download" on a separate laptop without having to do much. These mailboxes do not have a lot of items. Once I finally archived old stuff and cleaned up the conference room calendars they were easily selectable in Open a Shared Calendar, but I suspect the problem hasn't actually been solved.

That would tend to indicate there is problem either with the Exchange server or the mailbox. Most likely cause is third party interference. I have never seen the symptoms you describe with a live mailbox before except where there are a very large number of items in the folder, when Outlook struggles to process them. However that wouldn't affect OWA because OWA only displays a subset of the items, making it ideal for dealing with large mailboxes. If you create a new mailbox, does the problem follow? If you create a new mailbox and then move the items to the new mailbox, does the problem follow? Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP. http://blog.sembee.co.uk , http://exbpa.com/