For the last few days, one of my clients has been experiencing problems with their Hosted Exchange email account.

The account worked fine on their iPhone and also from OWA, however, when trying to use Outlook 2010 on their Windows Vista Desktop, it would hang for about 15 minutes, before asking for their account password, then a further 5-10 minutes before it would connect to Exchange and update the Inbox.

After speaking to our Exchange admins, we couldn’t figure out the cause, so I decided to grab the machine and run the usual diagnostic checks, I also reinstalled Outlook and ran a virus and malware scan. Unfortunately, none of this resolved the issue.

I was checking all the settings when I noticed within the ‘Connection’ tab the ‘on fast networks, connect using http first’ proxy setting option was not ticked, so checked the box, restarted Outlook and the problem was resolved!

Outlook now connects to the Exchange server instantly, great!