Microsoft has confirmed that Classic Outlook is experiencing problems with an "out of memory or system resources" error message. This issue occurs when more than sixty emails are opened at the same time.
In a new support doc, Microsoft states:
When you open more than sixty emails and have them all open at the same time, Outlook may display one of the following errors and crash:
"Sorry, we're having trouble opening this item. This may be temporary, but if you see it again, you may need to restart Outlook. No memory or system resources. Close some windows or programs and try again.”
The company is investigating what exactly is causing this out-of-memory (OOM) bug. It could be a memory leak or something else, since sixty emails are highly unlikely to fill the memory buffer unless one has a gigabyte of RAM .
While Microsoft is investigating (also investigating Classic Outlook that hangs when copying text), it has provided a solution for those who need to have more than sixty emails open at work.
Search for regedit, open the app and follow the path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Windows\USERProcessHandleQuota
and change the value.
The company says:
To resolve the issue, use one of the following workarounds:
Avoid opening more than sixty emails at once.
If you need to have more than sixty emails open at once, you can set USERProcessHandleQuota as documented in this article, User Objects – Win32 apps.. Increasing the process limit could lead to overall system instability because it allows all processes on the machine to have more user objects open at the same time, putting extra strain on the operating system.
This value can be set to a number between 200 and 18.000. The default is 10000 Decimal which is also represented as 2710 Hexadecimal..
Check out the official one support article on the Microsoft website.
