EWS Optimized Paged Item Loading

A system for optimized paged item loading in Exchange Web Services (EWS) improves response time of user queries to EWS. In contrast to conventional implementations that search an entire folder first, and then present results to user, this invention features not searching the entire folder, but searching only portions of the folder and then only searching portions until a desired number of results is obtained. Folders are sampled in an interval of N items and then using an abstract paging mechanism, thus defining a new restricted page with a limited item count of N. The sampling is performed in a first operation, for example, by using FindItem. In a second operation, FindItem is again used with a requested restriction, which is limited to the restricted page according to the samples. Searches may be limited by the amount of items to return or results (result set) desired.