Determining Changes In Outlook Mac Outlook 2016

Heres the critical part of the log errors: The recurrence format wasnt valid., The duration between startTime and endTime (6.00:30:00) of the recurrence is greater than the minimum duration between two occurrences (1.00:00:00). The error message itself narrows down a little bit what were looking for - a meeting invite for a recurring meeting.

Everytime I open outlook and check mail it says determining changes and cycles through inbox, trash, sent, drafts etc.

It spends ages doing this but ultimately no mail is received at all.

Settings include options for downloading message headers and when to sync and update folders.

To access these settings, click Outlook Preferences Accounts, select the IMAP account, and then click Advanced.

Determining Changes In Outlook Mac Outlook 2016

TL;DR Objects in an Exchange Online mailbox unable to be synchronized to the Mac Outlook 2016 client cause significant CPU usage and impact battery life.

The Symptoms The recent Spectre Meltdown updates have me keeping a closer eye on CPU usage and slowdowns in general.

In doing so I have been reminded just how much CPU Microsoft Outlook 2016 for Mac takes up.

On both my Mac systems its continually on the top apps list taking up 70 of a core.

I get plenty of email, but really not enough to keep it so busy.

On my laptop its impacting battery life significantly whenever Outlook is open.

This morning I decided to dig a little deeper into whats going on.

When Im mobile and using a MiFi or tethering to a phone, that adds up.

My setup is pretty simple - a corporate email account run through Exchange Online Office 365, and both Windows and Mac Outlook clients.

The Windows Outlook 2016 app is well behaved, using minimal resources.

Investigating Outlook Outlook 2016 for Mac doesnt give you much detail on what its up to, but it does have a few things we can look at.

This looks interesting - Its constantly trying to sync a particular folder.

But why To get more info we need to head back to the Sync Errors window.

Sync Errors has a settings icon at the top right coder, that will let us Turn on logging for troubleshooting.

It doesnt bother to mention that you need to restart Outlook for the logs to actually show up.

The process of enabling logging for Outlook on Mac is detailed at this Microsoft page If I open up the directory LibraryContainerscom.microsoft.outlookDataLibraryLogs now I have a log file to look into.

A log file that is filled with messages like this: From the timestamps, Outlook for Mac is nonstop trying to sync with Exchange Online but getting errors and then instantly trying again.

This is very poor design, not backing off or throttling when an error is encountered or ignoring the offending object and moving on with the sync operation.

The error message itself narrows down a little bit what were looking for - a meeting invite for a recurring meeting.