Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails Microsoft has confirmed that opening too many emails at once in Classic Outlook could result in the application displaying an error before crashing. But don't worry; there's a registry change to fix it. The problem afflicting Outlook 365, according to Microsoft, can occur when users open more than 60 emails at the same time. …
You do have to wonder just what sort of pst-up "almost but not quite unlike email" system ever thought it would a good idea to stuff all of your email (etc) into one giant complicated (and therefore easily corrupted) "data" file? Even mbox, which is at least human-readable, restricts itself to the rather more rational choice of one file per mail folder.
Okay. I barely if ever read email1, so I’m probably atypical, but who needs 60 emails open at once?? Who’s keeping track of that many things?
If it’s you, there’s probably a much better way.
1. It’s a trick I learnt off an old manager. Try it. It’s liberating. Is amazing how little difference it makes; people will find you if it’s important.
Yes, people who care will find you, but automated processes and general announcements will not.
"The maintenance window for tomorrow has been shifted, and the system will be unavailable from 6AM through 10:30AM."
"Due to a provider change, you must have any health plan changes submitted to the Benefits office by the end of this week."
"Beginning tomorrow at noon, roof maintenance on building West One will commence. Do not park your vehicle closer than ten rows from the base of West One, or it will be subject being struck by tar, roofing nails, and/or other debris."
"SYA10 has exceeded 98% disk consumption. Auto-deletion of large user files will begin in 30 minutes."
Etc.
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I know a user who sometimes has like 30 emails open, it's literally just that he tends to get distracted by other things and forgets to close the emails. A couple times a day he goes through them and closes what he's not actively using and leaves open what he's monitoring or working on. I guess it works well enough for him.
Work/coordination often comes in via email (across or between orgs) for me.
Pop open your todo list and burn down the work until you get to the actual items that need to be scheduled... if you finish great... start on those scheduled tasks and prep... otherwise.. you start having a lot of outlook emails open. Pretty common workflow, but has issues like any others I suppose... reboots are a big deal... as is logging off.
Keeps your housekeeping to a minimum and outlook records everything as you need to know what, exactly, you told company XYZ 2 years ago as they've forgotten--again. Saves a lot in rework fees as they imagine things and you can stop that before it gets too far.
Why should it crash anyway? If it starts to run into resource issues and it knows it, just stop the opening of more emails with a "that's enough emails, deal with what you've already got before doing any more".
I think the only time I've opened now than a few emails at a time is when outlook has already ground to a halt and somehow my frustrated keyboard mashings get cached and later interpreted as "select all -> enter".
I have wondered about that, and worried a bit.
When I was a young lad, people carried most of the phone numbers they used around in their heads. If they were in sales or were executives (that is, people who dealt with many peoples' phone numbers) they had a Rolodex or an "address/phone book" which they stored them in. I remember the phone number of the house I grew up in, and the phone number of my first love, but not any of the many phone numbers I've had since then.
I know people who are totally lost driving around if they don't have a working satnav system in their car.
It's as if not having to memorize something inhibits the formation of that memory.
I also still remember our first home phone number, but it was only four digits!
As for driving, I used to memorise the whole street map of a city and half a century later, I can still drive around those three big cities without satnav. However, a couple years ago, I had cancer treatment and that messed up my spatial memory so that now in my present city, I depend on Satnav to find my home, because the streets always feel ‘new’ and I tend to miss turns, despite having driven there hundreds of times.
Interesting. I've never consciously memorized maps, but I like to use the paper type. (Good ones, or sometimes, any, city maps are hard to find these days.)
When I worked as a delivery driver during uni (pre-GPS), we always would call the customer and ask them to give us directions to where they lived, along with their address. We'd translate their directions to a not-to-scale map we'd draw on a little square of note-paper, and that worked well. You'd be surprised at how many people were unable to give us directions to their house.
> the phone number of the house I grew up in
829 4837 From LBJ through Jerry Ford. So nearly 50 years ago. Also HLO-202 license plate.
My current state wants to recall my current random assign license plate and I'm paying a "vanity" fee to keep a very ordinary number _which_I_have_finally_memorized_.
More charitably, if you feel the need to open 60+ emails, chances are you have much bigger problems than software-related ones, and should, if you can temporarily control the weeping, urgently consult your therapist/union rep/dealer (delete as appropriate1) rather than tech support.
1Assuming these are not the same person.
30 years of MS products and still no way to easily do task management beyond "keep this email open until I answer it".
"The attachment from this email is still open, don't close the email"
"You can't attach this, you have it open and unmodified"
"You don't have permission to mark this conversation chain in your inbox as read"
Anything to do with Teams. Copy a conversation? Duck you with a blunt pole. Find a previous conversation? Me hole you can (see pole). Paste with formatting? Paste my shiny MS arse.
I have users who "have to have all those emails open, it's my process".
Obviously it's utter bullshit and they are always the ones who "don't trust it because it lost my files" cloud storage and store their shite in some arcane set of folders in the root "I lost data once" because they didn't use the fucking cloud storage or archive their 10GB of emails, monthly, in dozens of PSTs "to save space" in their 100GB Exchange mailbox.
Rant over. Onward to today's walking nightmares
Opening more than 60 emails at the same time....
Reminds me of the old "doctor" joke.
Patient: "Doctor, doctor, every time I do this I get a terrible shooting pain in my neck"
Doctor: "Well stop doing it then".
60 emails, at the same time... Seriously!
Some people need to learn how to use a bloody computer....
“…a part of me is of the opinion that if you open 60 emails at once then you sort-of deserve something bad to happen…”
I’m just wondering what kind of friggin gesture interface causes somebody to spontaneously bulk-select 60+ emails then execute some command, like “open,” on them.
This is the sort of modern ui baloney that causes my mom to call up and request I travel across the city and reverse/recover whatever disaster inadvertently happened.
It’s like, all you need to do is grip the screen in one weird way and it grabs all your email folders and forwards everything to Uncle Jake, or some damn thing.
Had a guy at previous company would always have loads of mails open, would get MAPI resource error messages but was senior enough to give us the brush off to our polite recommendations to perhaps not open so many mails at a time.
This was back in Exchange 2003 and 2010 days. Microsoft.Mapi.MapiExceptionSessionLimit., event 9646
Ended up having to give him View Information Store Status rights on Exchange to get around it.
90's? back then we used banyan email, eudora, pegasus email and lotus notes. switched to outlook when a new college president wanted to use the college email on his new iphone and it didn't work at the time with notes, so we switched to outlook. took at least 6 months, maybe longer as we had to move the old system email to outlook. The reason for the switch may be apocryphal as i got this 2nd hand. The reasons for the switch anyways, i was involved in moving the old email to the new system.
First the article says "Classic Outlook" as in Outlook.exe? Then goes on to talk about Outlook 365 chrashing.
Two different things aren't they.
I do believe Micro$oft has been sabotaging Outlook.exe every month to get people to go to Outlook365.
Screw Micro$ofr, I started using ThunderBird. I disapprove of everything 365.
First the article says "Classic Outlook" as in Outlook.exe? Then goes on to talk about Outlook 365 chrashing.
Two different things aren't they.
They could have been more precise, but Microsoft 365 installs an "Outlook.exe", which, assuming one has not clicked the "Try the new Outlook" toggle at least, is just an up-to-date build of classic Outlook. Yes, you can use Outlook 365 on the web, and yes, you can opt in to the "new Outlook", but assuming they are talking about the installable, non-new "Microsoft Outlook for Microsoft 365", I think it's fair to refer to that as either "Classic Outlook" or Outlook 365.
"the x at the top left to close the window, top left, who puts it at the top left?"
Not Windows as it is MS that has the final (and only choice?)
I did change my Openbox config to have [x] top left with rollup/down [_], iconize and maximize on the top right. ie <titleLayout>CLSIM</titleLayout>
Reason? I got sick of accidentally closing windows when I wanted the option next to it. Big user of rollup/down. Don't have the problem now and I imagine [alt]+[F4] would also work or the key bindings reconfigured to make it so.
"Classic Outlook" and Outlook as part of Office/Microsoft 365 are the same thing, just with a different license structure.
The article refers to Classic Outlook to differentiate it from "New Outlook", which is the latest incarnation of Outlook Express - the hobbled, even less predictable, half cousin of actual Outlook.
I'm pretty sure that Microsoft have done some market research and found the Outlook is the only product that businesses deem critical to get from MS and as such everything is gradually being renamed to Outlook - hence Outlook (the latest incarnation of Hotmail), Outlook (the email/calendar/contacts app), Outlook (the mobile version that's so different to the desktop that it should have a distinct name) and Outlook (the 'new' pile of dung)
> which is the latest incarnation of Outlook Express - the hobbled, even less predictable, half cousin of actual Outlook.
It's not even that, it's al electron app pointing to OWA, like "new teams" is an electron app pointing to teams online. It's why new outlook can't open locally saved email files, because that would mean uploading them to OWA to process and it doesn't support that.
A couple of years ago I raised a support ticket with Microsoft. The support ticket was specifically "I know how to add this type of calendar in Windows, on the web, or in old outlook for Mac, but can't find the option in the current outlook for Mac".
The call started with the Microsoft support engineer telling me to use their screen sharing things so he could see my screen, then as soon as it loaded he said in a confused tone "umm, there is no ribbon? What is this?".
That is the level of support that outlook for Mac gets from Microsoft. (After escalating multiple levels, the official answer finally came back that outlook for Mac does not support that feature)
> I can't think of a reason to open 60 emails at once.
You have just been added to the CC for an email discussion that has been going on for a while.
Every single sodding reply has been top posted[1]. And each one had some techie detail that you are trying to cross reference against the next (too much just to assume you'll keep all those part numbers and contract IDs straightin your head without constantly looking back at them).
As the last person in the chain, you now have 3 working days left to develop The Solution that sales have been keeping to themselves for the last 4 months. GO!
To read everything in a sane fashion, you open that email, scroll to the bottom; place this at the top of your portrait screen (this is not your first rodeo). Open it again, put new copy under first and scroll to reply #1. Open it again, put new copy under previous and scroll to reply #2. Open it again, put new copy under first and scroll to reply #3; note that this one has a digit different in the part number - a mistake? Open it again, put new copy under previous and scroll to reply #4.
Repeat. And again.
After an hour of this, you have almost finished working out what the bleep is going on (yes, that part number change was an error, but it was only spotted in month 2, but the contract IDs really did change). Wipe sweat from brow. Acknowledge the presence of the other Devs, now gathered around your chair, open mouthed at the sheer audacity of trying to decode in one sitting an "all the requirements are in here" email.
Prepare to open message again and scroll to reply #103 (you closed the week's worth of arguing about whether fire should be fitted nasally) when BANG (or rather, phut) and Outlook crashes. In a Classical style, with a Geek Chorus of moans from all the occupants of your cubicle.
[1] one of the greatest sins that Microsoft has committed, convincing people that top posting is the way to go.
Or maybe, in that situation, I might just print it out, chuck the 50 pages which are repeat after repeat of the corporate "signature"* and disclaimer in to the scrap paper box, spread out the remaining 25 and break out the highlighters.
M.
*just as bad as top posting - the mess they create by not snipping everything after the non-existant dash-dash-space-return
Egad Man, create rules and automatically mark that guff as read....
I have a desktop chugging away on my desk 24/7 with Outlook running just to process the rules for incoming the hundreds of alerts, ticketing system updates and other extraneous nonsense that I need to receive but rarely need to read...
I have users who will open an incoming mail and if it needs action they'll leave it open until they get round to dealing with it - they then close it and leave it in the inbox.
Result, multiple open emails (although 60 would be excessive I've seen around 20 at once) and an Inbox running to thousands of messages.
I've tried educating them, if it's in the inbox it needs dealing with, otherwise it's deleted or filed, to no avail.
Seen similar.
Had just started with a new company and a lady called me in tears because Outlook had for some reason marked all her mails as read.
I didn't grasp the issue until she spelled it out.
Her workflow process was to look at every mail that came in then mark the ones she had to go back and deal with as Unread. She had hundreds of mails that she needed to go back to but didn't know which ones they were.
She'd never been taught to use flags, or that you could create sub-folders to put stuff in. Exchange and Outlook had just been chucked in and users left to fend for themselves.
I had pity but there was nothing I could do of course.
A lot of people suffer with this problem, an assumption that everyone knows how to use product x.
You get this still roll out a new product and let the users fumble around until they come across a method of getting it to work (which is probably correct but 20 steps more than it should be). But provide some training materials why should we do that…
If you want people to work well, then give them a hand so they can be more productive and don’t act like the forum dwellers of old when asking a simple question got you classed as a newbie and scared off asking anything again.
A lot of people suffer with this problem, an assumption that everyone knows how to use product x.
Not just users; as a long career dev several of the industries I worked in assumed that the devs knew how to use the product and what the industry involved. People speak in code and acronyms and abbreviations without realising that not everybody is in the same club. I once pointed out to a QA/Tester that given a list of bugs/defects most devs will fix the easily understood ones before bothering to check the priority list.
And it gets even worse when people use multiple terms for the same item/process - the uninitiated then have to figure out that they are in fact talking about A whether they say X or Y or Z. Then some industries appropriate terms from other industries but change the definition slightly; so you are never quite sure which definition applies.
If you want people to work well, ...
Back in the "good ol days" (< 2010) the UI (be it app or web) was designed to lead the user through the workflow in the simplest, most logical path. These days it seems to be to jam as much (relatively) unrelated stuff on the screen as possible and make the user figure out what goes where. The number of forms I have submitted only to be told that something is wrong/missing - give me a hint as I go so that I only have to submit it once! Don't block me (as some do) as I may genuinely need to look something up and come back to that field.
We have 1 user who started her new job and immediately admitted she didn't have a clue how to use any of the tools that companies assume nobody needs to be shown, like outlook.
After 2 weeks of at least 1 phone call a day for some quick little question or other I wouldn't be surprised if she was the only user we have who is actually using every piece of software correctly and storing data in the correct folders instead of the recycle bin (seen multiple times, genuinely) etc.
Of course it also helps that she is one of those people where whatever mood you are in at the start of the call, it will be better at the end...
"they then close it and leave it in the inbox"
The inbox should be for unread messages. The S/W should deal with this by (a) not being able to leave a message there once opened and (b) providing some other means of storing those the user doesn't choose to bin.
Such an application might need a little getting used to but then for some people, so does looking each way before corssing the road.
Worked on some high end Windows software which detected out of memory errors and popped up a dialog box telling the user to close down apps to free up memory. I looked at the code behind this and all it did was try again and then ... crash. Turns out our software leaked memory and memory fragmentation was the real problem. No fix for that but to restart the software, which the crash forced the user to do.
They’re just trying to steer people away from outlook and onto their rephrehensibly poor “New Outlook”. Yes, it’s a minor problem — who opens 60 emails at once? So Microsoft starts rubbishing the product by highlighting one of its many failings.
New Outlook, like everything Microsoft makes, is utter shite. It's missing so much functionality that could have been put in. You'd think that given a blank slate, they could have made the effort and put in some of the many features that old outlook is missing. But no, it's actually got less functionality.
Sorry to overuse a term, but are they gaslighting us?
Cloud email. That's why. The new Outlook clients carefully don't do anything that involves iterating the entire onbox folder, so that the server won't get to do an unfair share of the work. This is why you can't (for example) filter a load of messages, select-all, then move them to a folder, as that would be server work. Instead, you only get to select the first screenfull, so the move (or delete, whatever) is then done client-side, and the server catches up with the result at leisure.
Microsoft warned: "Increasing the process quota could lead to overall system instability because it enables all processes on the machine to have more user objects open at the same time, placing additional strain on the operating system."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something but I kind of thought one of the reasons for having things like windows, tiles, - call them what you will - was expressly to allow users to have multiple objects open at the same time. And yet this places an 'additional strain' on the OS? Have a heart: barely minutes after struggling through its boot and init. process, we're all thoughtlessly expecting it to handle things like user session data; it's clearly all our fault and we're asking way too much of it!
You could be forgiven for thinking this stuff was just a fancy wrapper around those good ol' DOS 3 libraries ;)
Nothing new! I remember having a problem over 25 years ago with an obscure and long forgotten Windows 3.1 (or was it Windows 95?) E-mail package that integrated with the obscure LAN sofware we sold.
Our head salesman was complaining that his E-mail client was running extremely slowly. On a visit to his desk the issue was obvious what was wrong. Whenever he'd finish reading a new E-mail he'd click on minimize instead of the close button. Consequentially he'd have dozens of open windows, and whenver a new message arrived, each window would have to have its title updated to reflect the number of the mail message in that folder.
Of course back then the PC would probably have had no more than 16MB of RAM installed.
Anyone opening 60 emails at the same time and claiming they actually need this deserves to have them all merged into one email which would randomly pick attributes from each of the 60: subject made from the first word of each of the 60 subjects, senders picked up randomly, and message body compiled from every 3.14159265359th letter multiplied by the golden ratio in random increments, then automatically forwarded to every single email address present in said 60 emails.
I may be wrong but isn't that the EXACT procedure BT Openreach use for their fault-response?
All together now while we chant their company motto:
Your call is important to us and you are 1,000th in the queue
Kind of agree though: anyone *needing* 60 emails open at once is a cry for help that any real BOFH armed with quicklime, a cattle-prod and an open window would be only too happy to 'correct'
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