Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac, 2nd Edition

Speed Up Your Email

In this chapter I talk about some of the things that can make email much slower than it needs to be when accessed using desktop clients such as Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook, and how to address those issues. But be sure to also read the next chapter, Speed Up Your Network, which covers general network issues that could also have an effect on your email.

Adjust Checking Frequency

If you depend heavily on the timely receipt of email, you may have set your email client to check your IMAP or POP account as frequently as possible—say, once per minute. Paradoxically, such frequent checks can slow down your email client, in some cases increasing the amount of time it takes to receive new messages.

The reason is that each check ...