Outlook 2002 less reliable than previous versions? (SP2)

Topic

New Reply

I’ve been using Outlook 2002 on XP for a few months now, and my experience is that it is considerably less reliable than Outlook 98, where I always got the yellow envelope to indicate a new piece of mail has been received, and I never got any problems with hangs or crashes in Calendar or meetings within Calendar.

I’ve always been up-to-date with fixes (yes, Windows Update actually works for me, amazingly!), so I wonder whether anyone else shares my views on the unreliablity of Outlook 2002?

Reply | Quote

Replies

For what it’s worth, I’ve been using Outlook 2002 on XP home on my home PC, and on XP Pro at work since February of this year, without serious problems. It has happened a few times that I didn’t get the new mail notification at work, but certainly not frequently.

Reply | Quote

For what it’s worth, I’ve been using Outlook 2002 on XP home on my home PC, and on XP Pro at work since February of this year, without serious problems. It has happened a few times that I didn’t get the new mail notification at work, but certainly not frequently.

Reply | Quote

I would agree that’s it’s definitely less reliable – well, on Win98 platform anyway – I find emails often don’t get to me and sometimes are 48 hrs late. I’m not all to impressed with it – and don’t really trust it. Stick to OE, but definitely *not* with McAfee virus software.

Reply | Quote

I wouldn’t think Outlook has any influence on how long emails take to get to you! I’m using XP Pro, so Outlook should work well there…

Reply | Quote

My experience with OL 2002, as part of OfficeXP Pro, running on Win2000 Pro has been good. I don’t rely on the yellow envelope though and have just noticed that the new message which arrived as I am typing did not cause the icon to appear in my tray.

Using calendar, meeting requests, reminders, etc hasn’t caused any problems. I’ve been using XP since late last year.

Reply | Quote

Hi Granville,

I am not sure if this is the cause for you not seeing the envelope icon in your system tray or not, but Outlook 2002 introduced a new feature that can cause this. If you go to Tools>Options, then on the Preferences tab click on the Email Options button and then the Advanced Email Options button there is a section around the middle of the window with options for when new mail arrives. You can select whether or not to show the envelope in the system tray. If yours is not showing up you may have that setting unchecked.

Cheers,

Reply | Quote

I hadn’t really missed it, until I went looking for the thing.

Reply | Quote

You may already have thought of this, but one possibility is that the taskbar is auto-hiding the new mail notification. Have you tried right-clicking on a blank area of the taskbar and choosing ‘Properties’, and then ‘Customize’ next to ‘Hide inactive icons’. You should be able to tell it to ‘Always show’ for the envelope. I use Outlook 2002 with XP-pro, and have never had a problem with that (although I do have other complaints – but they are no worse than with Outlook 2000).

Alex

Reply | Quote

You may already have thought of this, but one possibility is that the taskbar is auto-hiding the new mail notification. Have you tried right-clicking on a blank area of the taskbar and choosing ‘Properties’, and then ‘Customize’ next to ‘Hide inactive icons’. You should be able to tell it to ‘Always show’ for the envelope. I use Outlook 2002 with XP-pro, and have never had a problem with that (although I do have other complaints – but they are no worse than with Outlook 2000).

Alex

Reply | Quote

I hadn’t really missed it, until I went looking for the thing.

Reply | Quote

Hi Granville,

I am not sure if this is the cause for you not seeing the envelope icon in your system tray or not, but Outlook 2002 introduced a new feature that can cause this. If you go to Tools>Options, then on the Preferences tab click on the Email Options button and then the Advanced Email Options button there is a section around the middle of the window with options for when new mail arrives. You can select whether or not to show the envelope in the system tray. If yours is not showing up you may have that setting unchecked.

Cheers,

Reply | Quote

My experience with OL 2002, as part of OfficeXP Pro, running on Win2000 Pro has been good. I don’t rely on the yellow envelope though and have just noticed that the new message which arrived as I am typing did not cause the icon to appear in my tray.

Using calendar, meeting requests, reminders, etc hasn’t caused any problems. I’ve been using XP since late last year.

Reply | Quote

I wouldn’t think Outlook has any influence on how long emails take to get to you! I’m using XP Pro, so Outlook should work well there…

Reply | Quote