The quality of the Outlook Mail Performance simulation is improved by disabling the “Cached Exchange Mode“ property of the e-mail account used to run the simulation. Disabling the cache avoids deleted e-mail messages remaining in the inbox and sent-items folders. This is especially the case when the e-mail account is accessed by multiple watcher nodes.
The Cached Exchange Mode property is enabled by default to increase the working speed within Outlook and to enable the indexed searches. Outlook automatically synchronizes the local cache with the Exchange server. Working in Cached Exchange Mode is fine when a user opens Outlook at the beginning of the day and closes the application at the end of his working time. Between opening and closing, Outlook has enough time to synchronize all changes.
The Outlook Mail Performance simulation package uses Outlook to monitor the e-mail send and receive performance and availability. To do so, the simulation starts Outlook and interacts with the application to perform specific actions. At the end of the simulation, the sent and received e-mails are removed from the mailbox to keep the e-mail account small. After removing those e-mails, Outlook is closed by the simulation. Due to the short timeframe between removing the e-mails and closing Outlook there is not always enough time to synchronize the local cache with the Exchange server.
If one mailbox is used by several watchers this can even lead to duplicate e-mails. The synchronization process sees the e-mail on the server as a new instance if it is touched or synchronized by another Outlook instance in the meantime.
Disabling the Cached Exchange Mode property for the e-mail account solves the issue. After disabling the Cached Exchange Mode property, Outlook will send every request directly to the Exchange server and waits for a confirmation that the Exchange server has handled the request.
Disabling the local cache and removing the sent and received e-mails ensures the e-mail account stays small and that the size of the mailbox is not lowering the simulation performance.
Follow the steps below to disable the Cached Exchange Mode property for a specific e-mail account. These steps have to be performed on every watcher using the e-mail account:
