in message
Today it takes a long time to open messages in Outlook 2003. What
could be
the reasons?
They are large. More bytes to download means more time. You never
mentioned if you are a highspeed cable/DSL user or a low-speed dial-up
user but the same effect is present for both connection types. You
never mentioned how long is "a long time" and for what size for the
inbound e-mails.
Your anti-virus software is configured to scan inbound e-mails which
is superfluous protection (it moves detection earlier during the
download rather than wait until you attempt to save the attachments
but detection coverage is the same). Try disabling e-mail scanning in
your anti-virus software.
Your mail host is busy.
Other processes running on the same host as the mail server program
are sucking up lots of CPU cycles (which leaves less for the mail
server program).
The network between you and your mail host is choked because of heavy
usage, or some hardware is malfunctioning which doesn't provide the
normal bandwidth level as before. Could be there is lots of noise on
your connection which results in having to resend the packets which
incurs delay to resend them (run "ping -n 25
www.yahoo.com" to see
what is your average packet loss).
And probably lots of other reasons that I haven't thought of in this
short response.