Microsoft Outlook client is designed to synchronize its files in all the Outlook folders with those on the email account inbox and outbox folders online. However, you might have a slow internet connection and would prefer to turn this option off, so that you can manually do the synchronization whenever required, without putting too much strain on the bandwidth. To do this, you have to change the particular Outlook setting.
How the folder synchronization works in Microsoft Outlook
The Outlook mail client updates the Outlook folders the moment it is launched. If you have added many email accounts, which have so many files in your account inbox and outbox, then it would take considerable amounts of time for them to download to the Outlook folders.
The mail client would come with the default Outlook setting to update the Outlook inbox and outbox after certain time period. These settings can be changed to suit your needs.
How to change the default Outlook setting for folder synchronization
The default settings for the folder synchronization can be changed by following these steps.
- Go to the Tools menu in the Outlook main window and select Options. On the Options screen, go to the Mail Setup wizard. There you would find the Send/Receive section with the Send Immediately When Connected already selected. Uncheck it.
- Now, click on the Send/Receive button that you would find right next to it. This would launch the Send/Receive Groups wizard. There you would find the Perform an Automatic Send/Receive When Exiting. Uncheck this as well.
- There you would also find the option Schedule an Automatic Send/Receive every _ Minutes. This option would be set to 30 minutes by default. Deselect this option as well.
- Now, save and exit from the wizard.
The automatic Outlook folder synchronization is now disabled. You need to realize that the Outlook would not from now on automatically update the inbox and outbox folders. You would have to do this manually to make sure that your get all the latest messages in your Inbox and all your saved files in the Outbox are indeed sent to the destination addresses.
When you change to a high-speed internet connection in the future, you can enable the automatic synchronization feature by going back to these options and changing it back to the default settings.
