Right then. i have come to the conclusion that Outlook XP hates me! i gets lots of email every day. i have over 30k emails sitting in different folders. i have Norton Antivirus 2003 and i also have Cloudmark AntiSpam installed. i usually have outlook open all the time cause it makes reading email easer. last night i was watching the F1 and it was slowing the system down so i stoped Outlook. I then forgot to open it again and when i got up this morning, i opened it and for the last 40 minutes its been sending and recieving email! 40 min to download about 500 emails! 40 MIN! and thats not the worst of it! the server is localhost! i run my mail server at home and ìts sitting on the same machine as outlook. The other thing is the fact that the machine that runs as a mail server also has 2 Athlon 2Gz CPUs. This is just anoying! Anyone know any tips? its a 7200RPM hdd with 8mb cache, so thats not a bottleneck, i dont think. Hmmm. talk about annoying! [update] found out why outlook is so slow. there are 37000 fragments of the outlook pst file, so im guessing thats the problem. 2 min after posting, i decided to check for a defrag. the report told me to defrag, so i am! So, woops!