I tested Outlook Mobile about a year ago.   It took about 10 minutes to deliver a message, as well as being sluggish for the user.   The actual flow path, which is in the message headers, was:   Phone to Microsoft Server, then relayed (after the big delay) from the Microsoft server to Smartermail.    This occurred when SmarterMail's EAS was not playing well with newer Android phones, but that was fixed several months ago.

I don't see any reason to give Microsoft easy access to my information, so I cannot imagine a good reason for using Outlook for Mobile.   The regular ActiveSync client works well.

Patrick,

I tested the current version of Outlook Mobile for Android and was unable to replicate the issue you reported. I tried setting up an account about half a dozen times, deleting the account from Outlook each time. In all those tests, there was one time where the app reported that the account could not be setup because the authentication timed out. Even then, the account was successfully configured in spite of the reported timeout. Diving into SmarterMail's logs seems to indicate that the reported timeout was not on our server, which seems to suggest that the delay was on Microsoft's Servers.

Do you know if your users are seeing this issue on Android or iOS? It is possible that you could be seeing an issue specific to the iOS version of Outlook Mobile. Given the way that Outlook Mobile works, it seems unlikely, but it can't hurt to rule out the possibility.

Something happened with our EAS connections. Suddenly all of them stopped working. I did not catch the connection between them. Kyle helped me figure that one out.

They all just happened to be the ones with issues.