A splash of color

Mutter, mutter, mutter.

So some months ago, my Exchange message store got moved from the local server here in Denver to one of our data centers. There were sound practical reasons for this, and I was assured that other folks had done it, and it would actually be faster for me for some things (remote dial-in, for example), and etc.

One thing they didn’t tell me was that my Outlook performance would go in the bloody toilet.

I mean, going from one folder to another was taking 20, 30, 40 seconds, with all the Outlook windows freezing during that process.

I’m easily distracted. In that amount of time I’ve jumped over to an IE window and started blogging something, or reading an article, or something else that then sends me back to Outlook a few minutes later.

I mentioned this lag to some folks, and they clucked their tongues and opined that was a pretty sad state of affairs, but, darn, naught to be done for it.

So finally, this morning, I said, “Screw it.” I really like organizing my mail into folders for the different content areas I oversee, but I can’t keep bouncing back and forth between them now with that sort of latency. So I started archiving stuff out, and merging the folders into a single “In” folder.

(I don’t leave everything in the Inbox for a couple of reasons. First, older versions of Outlook occasionally lost the Inbox contents. Second, and more important, if I reply to a message in a non-Inbox folder, Outlook lets me save the reply in the same folder. If I do it in the Inbox, the reply can only be saved in Sent Items. Which is really dumb, if you ask me. Which they didn’t, obviously.)

It was in the process of doing this that I noticed something very odd. The new folder I was moving things into was accessible at a (relatively) blinding speed.

But it had lots of messages, right? And so it should have been dog slow, right? The only difference between that folder and all my others was …

… the Custom View I had, which elegantly and very helpfully had different font sizes and colors for messages from different folks. So messages from my boss showed up big and blue and, thus, insistent on being answered, and Internet messages were clearly different, and my reports showed up distinctively, and …

I turned Custom View off on a folder that was dog slow. It was suddenly greyhound fast.

Son of a —

Clearly what happens is that the Outlook client is evaluating, one at a time, every single message in a folder when it is opened, so that it can be displayed properly (if the folder’s View is set to do that). For messages that have a simple binary, like opened/not, that’s easy. For messages that have a View based on sender, it’s not.

So I can use this Very Useful Tool of Custom Views, or I can get reasonable performance.

Frell.

I can route messages from some folks into certain folders, but that breaks up message threads. I can flag messages from my boss as high priority, but that attribute carries to any replies I send, too, which is not what I want.

Hrm.