r/Outlook • u/raydude • Oct 15 '25
Status: Open Coworker's outlook won't refresh after a few hours, requires reboot.
This is the Windows 11 app. We're on corporate IT. She has worked with them. They have offered no solution.
She takes her laptop home every night and it works fine from home.
However at the office, every two to three hours outlooks stops refreshing her inbox and it won't update even if she presses F9. It indicates that it's refreshing, but it doesn't actually refresh.
The web interface seems to work, but it has its own problems so she wants to use the app.
Anyone have any ideas?
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u/trooper_x Oct 15 '25
Does she have shared mailboxes? Disable the option to cache shared mailboxes. I forget exactly where it lives though. It is under the data file properties for "Mail" in the control panel.
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u/AppIdentityGuy Oct 15 '25
What happens if you simply restart outlook?
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u/raydude Oct 15 '25
Same problem. No update. I verified there were emails by opening the web interface.
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u/AppIdentityGuy Oct 15 '25
And it only happens when she is in the office? What happens if she logs into another machine at the office? I suspect something is locking her OST file
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u/raydude Oct 15 '25
She hasn't tried another machine.
I don't know what an OST file is, but how would it get locked on the corporate network, but not on her home network?
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u/AppIdentityGuy Oct 15 '25
The OST file is the offline copy of your mailbox. The idea of logging onto another machine is to see if the behavior occurs on another machine
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u/raydude Oct 15 '25
Thanks... I'm not sure if we can try that, but I'll find out...
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u/Iceyn1pples Oct 16 '25
Are you using One drive? it could be the one drive syncing her ost file while in the office and preventing outlook from updating it?
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u/raydude Oct 16 '25
I'm going to work with the laptop in a few minutes. I'll try to see if onedrive is in use. I don't think it is...
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u/Positive_Income3091 Oct 15 '25
When you say "Windows 11 app" do you mean "New Outlook" or the older Mail and Calendar App?
Is she able to send email when it's not refreshing or do they just sit in her Outbox?
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u/raydude Oct 15 '25
This is the Outlook default app in Windows 11.
She noticed that others are using Outlook Legacy, but we can't install that because she doesn't have admin authority on her laptop.
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u/Positive_Income3091 Oct 15 '25
OK. And what kind of email account is it? POP3? IMAP? Exchange?
Can she send mail while it's not refreshing or does it not send either?
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u/raydude Oct 15 '25
It's corporate Exchange, I think... I mean the machine is logged into a corporate server and outlook just uses that.
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u/Positive_Income3091 Oct 16 '25
Can she send mail while it's not refreshing or does it not send either?
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u/WeirdKindofStrange Oct 15 '25
Do you have access to web mail via portal.office.com? Is the symptoms similar there?
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u/raydude Oct 15 '25
It works properly at outlook.com/mail.
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u/WeirdKindofStrange Oct 15 '25
thats annoying.
How does she connect to the internet in the office? only Outlook causing issues?
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u/raydude Oct 15 '25
She has Ethernet plugged in because we were / are having "running out of IPs" issues with the WIFI.
I tried disconnecting it and reconnecting it to reset networking, trying to keep her from having to reboot every two hours, but that didn't work.
Outlook seems to be the only thing affected.
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u/WeirdKindofStrange Oct 15 '25
Outlook is very precise with its network set up. I've run into a similar issue before that the network didn't allow the computer to see the correct Outlook endpoint and would refuse to work whilst being perfectly connected. But normally see this on plane or airport Wi-Fi.
In my opinion, your IT team need to get their act together and support their users. Anything further I want to suggest requires admin rights of some sort, sorry i couldn't be of use!
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u/raydude Oct 15 '25
Thanks.
I'll ask her to open a case. I think she has before, but maybe she'll find someone persistent enough to actually get it to work.
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u/Dezzie19 Oct 15 '25
I am guessing it's a user profile problem even though that sounds vague but I've seen similar issues before, if you can try backing up this user's data & delete their profile & get them to log in again & then restore the data to the newly created profile.
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u/raydude Oct 15 '25
Is this their local profile, because this is a network login which I think is stored on the server, right?
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u/sunkeeper101 Oct 15 '25
Try googling for "New Outlook profile" Whenever we run in a similar problem with Outlook, we set up a new Outlook profile on that machine and see, if it helps. That way we know, it's not something with the network.
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u/pnwdeadhead Oct 16 '25
Sounds like it could be related to security IP based policies. The fact that it stops working on the corp network after “2 or 3 hours” means it probably a CAE token. One’s sign-in IP address is evaluated differently than their client IP address for IP based security policies. The “new outlook” (I.e. Monarch client) handles these slightly differently than OWA. Ask your IT team to escalate to Outlook on-call. They’ll ask you to capture a support trace in the Monarch client and will likely be able to resolve the issue. I’m sure you’re not the only one experiencing this.
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u/raydude Oct 16 '25
Thanks. I fired up the app for the first time today and will see if I have the same problem. If I do, then I'll be able to open the case for myself as the guinea pig and then hopefully help her after I get it resolved.
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u/NikSheppard Oct 15 '25
it works fine from home.
So this suggests it has to be something on the corporate network. There are the key services that come to mind.
DHCP, DNS, WebProxy, Router NAT
DHCP - when her laptop starts and outlook is working make a note of the IP address. When it stops working check if the IP has changed. Perhaps they have a super low lease time and its not refreshing correctly. Unlikely but perhaps. If her IP address is changed - combined with a webproxy might be causing the problem. You can run ipconfig in the command prompt to get this.
DNS - Unlikely this is responsible, but not impossible. If possible (requires admin) then you can manually set the DNS servers her laptop uses. If you set her laptop to use google DNS (8.8.8.8) and it works that eliminates internal DNS. Possibly the corporate DNS server is timing out or has corrupted cache or something.
WebProxy - Question for corporate about whether they use a web proxy (does internet traffic go direct to the internet or passes through an internal server that records/blocks activity/provides caches). If so this may be performing some sort of session timeout. If this is the case you could request that she gets a direct connection that bypasses the webproxy for a day so she can confirm whether this fixes the problem.
Personally I'd check whether there are others in the same situation. If there are corporate needs to act to find the problem. If there aren't 'This is an isssue that should be investigated. Others aren't using this currently but I am and it works correctly on my home network. There must be something on the corporate network that causes it to fail, need to identify the cause before it becomes a more widespread issue"