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10.5: Avoid Mail's 'no sound for new messages' bug
Authored by: ars on Dec 29, '08 07:50:30AM

I am not sure that polling your mailserver so frequently is a good thing to do. The Idle command has very little overhead, but direct checking a lot more (if I remember it correctly). I use instead Growl to announce the arrival of new mail.



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10.5: Avoid Mail's 'no sound for new messages' bug
Authored by: CarlRJ on Dec 29, '08 11:20:13AM

Yes, polling every minute places quite a load on the mail server -- oh, obviously not if it's just one user doing it, and if it's your own personal server, go for it. But if, say, half of the 10,000 users of some mail server do this, the effect is not too different from a Denial Of Service attack on the server. You may find that your provider's instructions for setting up your connection to the server insist on a minimum polling time of 5, 10, or 15 minutes, to avoid just such an unmanageable load (and I've seen servers that are configured to quickly return a cached "nope, nothing new" response to someone who keeps polling too often).

IMAP IDLE, on the other hand, imposes almost no load on the server, and gets you your mail nearly instantly. So you're likely much better off getting the Mail.app problem sorted out, or using Growl.



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