Why You Shouldn’t Check Your POP3 Email Too Frequently
Posted by KMFNJ | Filed under Tutorials
By "too frequently" I mean checking less than every 5 minutes or so. This may or may not be so much a problem these days, but it is something I've run into at work recently, so I thought it was worth mentioning.Checking your email account every minute or less causes massive traffic on your ISP's servers and degrades quality of service, not only for you but for other users as well.
This can also cause problems such as duplicate emails because if the POP3 check doesn't finish within a minute, you've already got another one scheduled right on top of it that may end up duplicating what wasn't completed in the prior session.
Editing the Send Receive value in Outlook:
I "borrowed" these images from: http://www.1planhost.com/support/s_mailpolling.asp
If anyone over there has a problem with that, you can send me an email and I'll gladly remove.
To edit the time that Outlook automatically checks the server for new messages, please do the following:
In Outlook, click Tools, then Options...
A new window will open. Click the "Mail Setup" tab at the top. Then click the "Send/Receive" button as pictured below
Next, edit the "Schedule an automatic send/receive every" value to be 5 or more minutes (I actually recommend TEN MINUTES)
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