When I close MS Outlook it doesn’t really close, it removes itself from view but continues to check for emails every few minutes. I don’t want it to do that, I want to close it completely. Can this be done?
P.S. Windows XP, Outlook 2003.
Instead of clicking on the X in the upper right corner, close the program in the task bar at the bottom of your screen. Right click then select close.
If you click the red X or menu the File >> Exit command , Outlook is 100% shut down & not checking mail. Period, amen.
You can prove this by looking in Task Manager. When Outlook is running there’s a OUTLOOK.EXE entry in the processes tab as well as an entry in the Applications tab. When you close Outlook as described above, both those disappear.
The real test is to leave the PC on & online but Outlook off for a couple days. When you start Outlook you can watch it downloading all your spam from those couple days. Proving it hadn’t been downloading all along while it was off.
Are you sure you’re really closing it? You can set it so minimizing it make the large icon+words entry disappear from the task bar but the small icon remains in the notification area (what some folks mistakenly call the “system tray”). While it’s definitely running, right-click the small icon in the notification area and see if “Hide when minimized” is checked. If it is, you might want to uncheck it to reduce the opportunity for confusion about whether its running or not.
If I use any of the shut down methods, red x, file menu/exit, or right click on the task bar and close, it doesn’t fully shut down. The program goes but the icon stays in the notification area and it continues to download mail. This is annoying because I don’t have the email accounts set correctly and it fails to download mail, interrupting me every 10 minutes with warnings. I know I can just set it to not check for mail but I’d also like it to be closed properly. I only open it to find old email messages.
I have a similar problem on my system. Outlook appears to be shut down, but it’s still listed in the Task Manager. So I shut it down there. (Right-click on the taskbar and select Task Manager.)
I have Outlook reading some kind of Lotus web mail, and I read the latter from time to time when I’m away from the office. What’s annoying is that in order to do that, I have to set Outlook not to clear messages off the server right away (if I don’t want to have to shut my computer down completely every time I step away from my desk). Otherwise, Outlook will be running invisibly in the background of my computer, checking and clearing off e-mails out of the web mail server every couple of minutes. But I would like to clear messages off the server once I am in the office and can view them on Outlook, since I have a high volume of mails piling up every day.
So it’s a bit of a pain.
Is this Outlook or Outlook Express?
Outlook
Strange. On my work PC running XP SP3 and Office 2007, clicking the top-right X closes the application and outlook.exe drops off of Task Manager about three seconds later after Outlook is done closing files and has put all of its toys away.
Only thing I can even guess at would be with the account settings, which you already said aren’t correct - my work PC talks to Exchange, but I’m guessing you’re using Outlook with POP3 or IMAP.