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E-mail has become an undeniably important part of our daily lives. Whether it is for professional, academic, or personal use, interruptions in our e-mail service can hinder us drastically.
You can often avoid the missed project deadlines, late papers, slow access, and other frustrations of poor e-mail performance. Follow the practices outlined in this article to make your e-mail faster and more reliable.
An e-mail client is another term for an e-mail program or application. E-mail clients include Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail, and Eudora, to mention a few. Some e-mail clients have better functionality and ease-of-use than others. OIT recommends using Mozilla Thunderbird, as it has solid support for SSL/TLS (secure communications) and IMAP. Thunderbird is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.
You are given a choice when setting up an e-mail client: IMAP or POP. OIT recommends IMAP over POP for a few reasons: IMAP is more reliable, more versatile, allows more flexible access to your e-mail. If you use the e-mail setup guides on this site, you will be set up for IMAP.
The primary cause of slow e-mail performance is an oversized inbox. This can happen for several reasons:
As a general rule, your inbox size should be smaller than 10 MB. Near 10 MB you will notice slower performance. You can check your inbox size at the Internet Account Options site.
Cleaning up your inbox does not mean that you have to delete these messages. The best way to keep your inbox under 10 MB, and still keep your mail, is to create folders. If you are using an e-mail program with IMAP, or WebMail, and you need help creating folders, you can refer to the help menu in your program or call 1-HELP or 612-301-4357 if you are off-campus.
All e-mail programs have an option to automatically check for new messages at a chosen interval of time. By default, in most programs this is ten minutes. If you keep a lot of messages in your inbox, then automatically checking for new mail every ten minutes can result in a heavy work load for the server. This causes a heavy load on the server because every time an e-mail program has to check for new messages, it has to effectively check every message, in the inbox on the server, to see if it is has a flag designating it as new, then download it if it is. If you have a lot of messages in the inbox, then the server is forced to perform many operations each time your client checks for new mail.
The U of M Technology Services recommends that you set the e-mail client to check for new mail every 15-20 minutes. This option is not inconvenient. If you are expecting an e-mail and do not want to wait every 15 minutes to see your new message, you can still check for new mail using the manual "check for new messages" (or similar) feature in your e-mail client.
