Entourage takes forever to begin downloading my emails

Question

When I am in my office on a high speed network, it works great. However, it is painfully slow when I sign on at home with a VPN connection through Comcast cable modem (I am connecting through a Airport base station). Any ideas? thanks

Answer 1

The problem is because I did not delete many emails and built up a huge email file on our company Exchange server. Each time I logged in with the VPN, my machine and the server had to synchronize. The size of my file was rediculous (my fault). It was so big that the Entourage email export utilities would not work - Entouraged asked me to verify the file and rebuild the file. I did both, but the export utilities still did not work.
The solution to the problem was to create a series of folders on my machine where I copied the emails. Since they were no longer in the file system that synchronizes with the server after I copied them to the folders, I was able to delete them from the synchonized file system on my notebook which also deleted them from the server - any other approach that we could think of would have caused the ton of emails to be sent back to me from the server.
The slow time to receive emails has been resolved and the overall performance of the machine has improved greatly.
Thanks for sharing the tips - they helped me sort out the root cause of my problems.