Outlook 2003. Cant open this item....connection busy performing other tasks.

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martyyn

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#206010 6-Dec-2016 16:13

Anyone seen this before ?

I have two people sat in an office with Outlook 2003 on both machines, both having the same IMAP account in Outlook. Its a new email address with a minimal amount of email on it at the moment. They share the work from this one email account and both want to see it on their PC's.

Today one has been getting the following error:

Can't open this item. The operation could not be completed because the connection is busy performing other tasks. Please try again later.

Outlook then appears to lock up until it gives them the 'Microsoft Office Outlook is not responding. Close the program|Wait for the program to respond' dialog box. That can be several minutes later.

I cant find anything on the web of any real use. They have an average internet connection through VF (typically 8-12Mb) and run several applications through web browsers, so are doing multiple things at the same time, but I've never seen this error before.

1101

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#1683363 6-Dec-2016 16:49

Outlook + imap : dont be surprised if you have some ongoing issues

Not very helpfull, but thats sometimes just the way it is
Ive seen Outlook imap sync issues so bad they had to go to pop3 .

or
Try Thunderbird
wait a day or so, may be a server glitch
try shutting down all other apps & see if it then works
could be trying to slowly sync a crapload of old emails (unlikely if its a new Outlook profile)
try with only 1 outlook open & see if theres still an issue
could be other cloud syncs sucking the life out of the PC, dropbox,ithingcloud,backuptocloudapp,googledrive,onedrive (Ive seen all that on running on a single PC)

best option : move to hosted exchange .

toyonut

1508 posts

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#1683370 6-Dec-2016 16:58

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

Honestly outlook has never been great with imap and 2003 is well out of date. What are the details of the PC? Who is the email provider?

Try Vultr using this link and get us both some credit:

http://www.vultr.com/?ref=7033587-3B

martyyn

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#1683710 7-Dec-2016 10:22

I'm surprised at Outlook not playing well with IMAP. Is outlook just expecting to be used with an exchange account ?

Yes, 2003 is well out of date. But there are some people you just can't convince to spend some money no matter how small the amount.

It may be they just go back to POP3 for this account. They use the coloured flags system quite extensively to track workflow and they are being reset with no actions from anyone.

1101

3122 posts

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#1684529 8-Dec-2016 11:35

martyyn:

I'm surprised at Outlook not playing well with IMAP. Is outlook just expecting to be used with an exchange account ?

imap is/was like a competing protocol to MS's Exchange systems (sort of).
Why would MS care is Outlook has imap bugs ?

It may just be an issue with the email hosting servers (sync issues) . You will never know , without spending alot of time testing

Bottom line, if they want a Professional email system, they need to spend money & come into the modern world
13 year old software, & imap or pop (+ old email servers?) just tell them it will allways be a best attempt only
pop3 & multiple users , youre just swapping one issue with a system with other potential issues .

Also, if they decide to go to hosted exchange , then they WILL have to upgrade Outlook

nunz

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#1689711 15-Dec-2016 20:14

martyyn:

Anyone seen this before ?

I have two people sat in an office with Outlook 2003 on both machines, both having the same IMAP account in Outlook. Its a new email address with a minimal amount of email on it at the moment. They share the work from this one email account and both want to see it on their PC's.

Today one has been getting the following error:

Can't open this item. The operation could not be completed because the connection is busy performing other tasks. Please try again later.

Outlook then appears to lock up until it gives them the 'Microsoft Office Outlook is not responding. Close the program|Wait for the program to respond' dialog box. That can be several minutes later.

I cant find anything on the web of any real use. They have an average internet connection through VF (typically 8-12Mb) and run several applications through web browsers, so are doing multiple things at the same time, but I've never seen this error before.

It isn't an @xtra address is it? there have been mail box lock issues. Confirmed by Spark and escalatred to Yahoo but no answer back