For Our IMAP Power Users (or those who just want to be)
January 7, 2009 by tracy · Comments Off
IMAP email has a lot of advantages. The main benefit being you can check your email from several different locations and then have it all sync up nicely at all the other locations.
In theory, this is the way IMAP should work.
However, we have seen a few settings and user habits that can cause issues when checking your email via an IMAP connection. The below recommendations can help you avoid the pitfalls of IMAP email and keep it a pleasant experience.
- Keep your Inbox folder cleaned out. The more email you have in your Inbox folder, the longer it will take to sync up with the server. The reason being that your local email software and server must talk to each other for much longer times in order to make sure that everything is there that should be. This can result in long download times for you, delays for other users on the server, result in corruption of your mail folders over a period of time, and even cause your email software to crash.
You will want to go through your Inbox folder regularly and either delete or move all emails into other folders; the fewer emails in your Inbox, the faster you will receive and download new mail and the less chance for folder corruption and crashes.
- Set your email software to check email no less than every 5 to 10 minutes. When too many users check their email at one time, it causes slow download times and even server connection refusals, creating an email nightmare for all users — especially if you keep large amounts of email in your Inbox folder.
You’ll want to set your email to check email once every 5 to 10 minutes — or longer — to keep the server load down while continuing receiving your email in a reasonable amount of time.
- Turn off the setting to keep your email software connected to the server. Some email software has a setting allowing it to stay connected to the server after downloading email. While this setting is great for in-house servers with few users, it does not work quite as well for remote servers with hundreds or thousands of users.
Please disable this setting for your IMAP connections and set your software to sync your email every 5 to 10 minutes.
By maintaining your email folders and settings, we hope to make the IMAP experience the best one possible. Should you have any questions regarding any of these settings and habits, we’d love to hear from you, so give us a call.