How often should I check?

General discussion about PopMan.

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Darkbee
Posts: 37
Joined: 02 Mar 2005, 15:30

How often should I check?

Post by Darkbee »

I've often wondered if there are problems with checking your mailboxes more frequently than every 10 minutes. I see that Popman will allow me to check my mail every minute but are there reasons why this is probably not a good idea?

There seem to be two things that I can think of why its not a great idea:

Firstly, you will generate more traffic on the mail server but how much traffic does a connect to see if there is any new mail really generate? (a few bytes at best, I would image). This only becomes a problem (maybe) if everyone using that mail server all do the same thing.

Secondly, Popman will use system resources more regularly which could be a problem on computers with limited memory (or CPU capacity). So, potentially your computer could slow down every minute. However, this seems even more unlikely a problem as the first option since, I dont' know what the minimum specs are for Popman but I suspect you could run it on a 386 with 16MB RAM!!! (pity you couldn't run the WIN95 OS on a machine like that though!)

So is this a load of nonsense? Is there any reason to fear checking my mail server extremely frequently?
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Jeroen
Posts: 53
Joined: 24 Jan 2005, 09:05
Location: Delft, Netherlands
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Re: How often should I check?

Post by Jeroen »

Darkbee wrote:So is this a load of nonsense? Is there any reason to fear checking my mail server extremely frequently?
It's not a load of nonsense, I think common sense is the only good answer. Of course, if everyone is going to check his/her mail every minute, servers all over the world will explode. And why would you do that, are you THAT important? I think every 10-15 minutes is enough. And probably even that is too often, because:

- Do you check your snailmailbox every 10 minutes?
- Do you go to the door every 10 minutes to see if there's someone?
- Do you answer the phone every 10 minutes, to listen if someone's there?

That's what I mean with "common sense" ... :wink:
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