cspacone

@itman - that is the approach I will take. thank you for your help.

@Marcos Disabling "...client plugins" also make Outlook respond within a few seconds of launching. Did not check the protocol filtering option. Q: between your suggestion and itman's, which would be the preferred method and why?

@itman your solution works. Outlook now contacts the POP3 server and begins downloading withing a few seconds of launching Outlook.

Doing this results in Outlook contacting the POP3 server and downloading messages within 6 seconds or so. Clearly, turning off AV is not something I intend to do! And as I'd stated earlier, if this is typical behaviour then I'll deal with the inconvenience. Just wanted to see if it was something that I was doing that could be easily corrected. -Chris

Temporarily disabling email protection has no positive impact on the speed at which Outlook checks and downloads messages from the POP3 server. Sits ion this state for up to 1 minute or so. This is where I went to temporarily disable Outlook integration:

I receive mail using POP3, no Exchange integration at all. Disabling integration with Outlook restores expected performance. I have not tried temporarily disabling scanning of incoming mail, I will do so and report back.

Environment: Microsoft Office Professional 2016 running under Windows 10 Professional with latest updates. Outlook Version 1907 (Build 11901.20218 click-to-run) Eset NOD32 12.2.23.0 Behaviour noted: When initially starting outlook the application takes up to 90 seconds to begin the send/receive mail process. If I disable NOD32 and restart Outlook it begins to check email very quickly, perhaps 120 seconds or less. I note that this is not new behaviour, Outlook has done this under NOD32 for as long as I can remember. Although this is only an annoyance, I would like to be able to correct this if possible. My apologies in advance if this question has been asked and answered; I did try several search terms but could not find a suitable match. regards, -Chris