Hello everyone.


I've recently switched back from Mac to PC and I have a little problem with Outlook.
I have 6 IMAP accounts set up and Outlook never seems to check for mail, unless I click the Inbox folder of each IMAP account. Then it instantly displays new messages.

That's not very practical for me as I don't want to have to do this every couple of minutes.

Thanks in advance of any help.

If you press F9 does it update those folders?

Hi bschorr-MVP, yes it does.

Go to the Send/Receive tab, click Send/Receive Groups | Define Send/Receive Groups and configure how often the All Accounts group does an automatic send/receive (it's probably set to 30 minutes).

Don't make it TOO often, or the system can bog down, but maybe you could set it for every 5 or 10 minutes. Then you don't have to do anything - the messages will update on that interval.

Oh thanks I'll try that.

Question: I have been using Thunderbird for a while on one of my PCs and it always displayed incoming mail instantly. As if it had a constant connection or something (I'm sorry if that sounds stupid). Why is it that if I set Outlook to auto-check every minute, it's going to impact my computer's performance?
Are they not doing the same thing the same way? After all IMAP is one standard (again, if this is overly simplistic or stupid, I am sorry, I'm no pro on these things).

Well, you can try setting it to every minute - but when you do that (espeically if all 6 accounts are on the same server) you're opening 6 connections and if any of the accounts are particularly busy you may end up in a situation where it doesn't finish downloading headers for an account before it begins the next check.

I don't know how Thunderbird handles their IMAP processing. You can try every minute with Outlook and it might work fine. Personally I don't find it that big a deal to wait 5 minutes for e-mail messages espeically if it means less chance of issues with my system.

Ah I see...
I think I will set the timeout to 30 or 40 seconds to prevent problems like you described.
Thanks for the explanation!

I should add that I'm more comfortable with an aggressive schedule if you only had 1 or maybe 2 accounts. The more accounts you have the more time I recommend you allow to let all of those separate accounts process correctly.