Little Machines — O2M FAQ: Speed

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About O2M's Speed

O2M works by interfacing directly with Outlook. Outlook is fast at some things, but can take more time when performing certain kinds of operations, including:

	•	Saving off attachments so they can be handled by O2M
	•	Saving HTML-based email
	•	Performing email address lookups

In general, O2M's performance is affected by:

	•	The amount of memory & CPU horsepower your PC has
	•	How busy Outlook is while exporting — is it checking for new email over a network every few minutes, for example?
	•	How busy your computer is while O2M is running — are CPU-intensive programs besides O2M running?

The kind of data you're exporting can determine how fast O2M will perform.

When exporting email, for example:

	•	How many emails are being exported?
	•	How large is each piece of email?
	•	Is each email text or HTML-based? (HTML emails take Outlook longer to save)
	•	Are you on a LAN with an Exchange server? If so, email address lookups can be slower if the network or server are busy
	•	Are attachments being exported, and if so, how many? Are they being saved into the emails or saved as stand-alone files?

And, when exporting contacts or calendar appointments:

•

Are you on a LAN? If so, address lookups can be slower if the network or server are busy

In short, O2M's performance will vary from one computer to another, one network to another, and also, depending on the kind of data you're exporting.

How Fast is O2M? In our baseline tests, O2M exported an average of 55 text-based emails without attachments per minute on a Pentium II 300Mhz PC with 128MB of RAM with an average email size of 25KB. This same performance would surely vary with a different CPU, different amount of memory, different average email size, whether you chose to export attachments, and so on.

Optimizing O2M

Here are some tips for making O2M run faster on any machine.

General Tips

Check your O2M version
Make sure you're using the right version of O2M for your version of Outlook. If you're using Outlook 2000, for example, you should be using O2M 2000.

Preserve your CPU while O2M is running
Try not to run CPU-intensive operations while using O2M if possible.

Use O2M when network traffic is low
If you're using O2M on a corporate LAN, and plan on exporting lots of data, you might want to wait until lunchtime or after work to do it; Outlook might operate more slowly if your LAN's traffic is heavy, especially when resolving email addresses in emails and calendar appointments.

Email Tips

Turn off mail checking temporarily
If you're performing a large one-time export, considering telling Outlook to temporarily stop checking for new mail while O2M runs.

Example: If your version of Outlook is configured to only check Internet mail, you can tell it to stop checking for new mail by clicking on Tools, then Accounts. Highlight the account you want to temporarily disable, click the Properties button, remove the checkmark from Include this account when receiving mail, then click OK. Now run O2M. When you're done, re-enable Outlook's mail checking.

Dont export all of your emails every time
If you plan on performing regular exports of your email, don't export all of it each time. Export it all the first time, then when you perform future exports, use O2M's Date Range filter to export only the new emails you've sent or received since your last export.

Limit your attachments
Use O2M's filters to exclude as many attachments as you can, because attachments slow Outlook down the most. When an attachment is exported, it must undergo several conversions in order to be made Macintosh-compatible, and this takes time. Specifically,

	•	use Skip Large Email Attachments to filter out large attachments. Remember, even if you skip an attachment because it is large, you can still save it to disk as a stand-alone file by clicking in the box marked If a large file attachment is skipped, save it to my PC's disk so I can examine it later.
	•	use Skip Windows Email Attachments to skip types of attachment files you'll never be able to use in the Macintosh world

Calendar Tips

Dont export all calendar appointments every time
If you plan on performing regular exports of your calendar items, don't export them all each time. Export them all the first time, then when you perform future exports, use O2M's Date Range filter to export only the new calendar appointments you've created or received since your last export.

Dont look up unnecessary email addresses
When you receive a meeting invitation in Calendar, it can often contain lots of invitees, especially if it's a company-wide invite. In order to save such an invite, Outlook tries to resolve all of the invitees' email addresses by default, which is time consuming if you're using an Exchange Server over a network. To avoid this, pick the smallest number of invitees you'd like to look up in the Email Address Lookups box to save time.

Revised 1/27/2006. Information is subject to change without notice.

UNIX is a trademark of The Open Group. Windows and Outlook are trademarks of Microsoft Corp. Macintosh and Mac are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Little Machines is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft Corp. or Apple Computer, Inc. © 2008 Little Machines, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Trademark pending.