How can I make sent e-mail appear in Sent mailbox faster?

3

Whenever I send a message using Mac Mail 4.5 (Mac OS X 10.6.7), it takes anywhere from 5 seconds to 1 minute before it shows up in the Sent mailbox. This drives me crazy, because:

  1. Sometimes I want to quickly send a follow-up by replying to the original message.
  2. Sometimes I want to send a message and then shut down for the day. I don't feel safe exiting Mail until I see my message appear in the Sent mailbox.

This was never a problem with Outlook on Windows -- it would show up right away.

I'm guessing that Mac Mail just treats "Sent" like any other mailbox, polling the server on a regular basis. Is there any way to make it "smarter" and realize that sent messages should appear in Sent right away?

Matt Solnit

Posted 2011-06-01T16:10:57.487

Reputation: 1 150

3What mail protocol are you using to connect to your mailbox? IMAP, POP3? – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2011-06-01T16:17:59.610

2Have you checked the Activity Window (Cmd-0) to see how quickly the emails are sent? It's possible that Mail only places them in Sent after they've actually been sent, which takes some time. – Daniel Beck – 2011-06-01T16:30:21.047

@techie2007 The "Account Type" is "Exchange 2007". I believe this means it's using the "Exchange Web Services" protocol (see http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3748).

– Matt Solnit – 2011-06-01T17:29:21.010

@Daniel great question. I just tried the following test: (1) opened the Activity dialog, (2) sent a message to myself, (3) saw in Activity that it was sent, (4) saw it appear in my Inbox, (5) waited over a minute and still did not appear in Sent, (6) finally clicked the "Get Mail" button and it appeared. – Matt Solnit – 2011-06-01T17:33:21.623

Answers

-1

tons of mail with attachments, spam, junk mail.. adds alot of latency to the mail client. try to disable synchronization of All Mail folder which gets really big. I remember Outlook Express would once bog down with only a few hundred emails in a folder. Nowadays 10K to 100K emails stored on the server is possible over time.. Learn to archive old mail and purge the All mail folder. Check for excessive Mail rule filters. Remember mail is 7bit ascii and is converted from 8 bit ascii, so images and large attachments are much slower than http or FTP downloads as well, throttled in smaller chunks. use links if possible instead of large videos.

Tony Stewart Sunnyskyguy EE75

Posted 2011-06-01T16:10:57.487

Reputation: 1 582

This old post popped up in the review queue. Might be more useful if you could focus it better as an actionable solution, with less commentary. Just a suggestion.

– fixer1234 – 2016-09-19T19:41:08.433

@fixer1234 thanks but that was 3 yrs ago when I started here – Tony Stewart Sunnyskyguy EE75 – 2016-09-19T22:11:16.717

Asked: 2011-06-01T16:10:57.487

Viewed: 507 times

Active: 2011-06-03T01:58:11.043