Recently my Outlook 2007 connection to my Google Apps mail account became increasingly slow and sluggish, to the point of extreme frustration. Slow syncs and a general sense of bloat were ruining my experience and making it close to unusable. During email syncs my system would practically hang as Outlook churned away.

Not acceptable. I either needed a solution or I needed to replace my email, contacts and calendaring solution. It was that bad. Now, I really have no desire to leave Outlook. It works great for me. What I needed was a fix, which was preferable to a wholesale replacement. I know Thunderbird works well, but at least for now it’s just not an Outlook equal replacement.

So, I searched today for a solution and — what do you know — quickly found an article on Digital Inspiration that helped me clean up my server configuration and improve performance substantially. With the huge onslaught of spam over the past couple months, my Gmail spam folder had grown to be HUGE, so removing that from the sync was probably a big deal. Also, I set up the inbox to grab headers only (different than the article suggests). In addition, I disabled a couple unused but active Outlook add-ins as described in this article.

The results? A speedy Outlook and no more hung apps. The sync with the Google IMAP servers is much faster. I actually can’t believe I put up with the bad performance as long as I did. All resolved now.