ICG Link News

02.25.09

Leaving Mail on the Mail Server. Part 1

If you leave a lot of messages in your mailbox on our mail server, problems will arise because of the way POP works. Every time your email program connects to download your mail, the mail system has to index all of those messages before it can deliver your mail. If your mail client (Outlook or whatever) times out waiting for that to complete, it initiates another connection. Since the mail system isn't writing anything to the socket, it doesn't realize the client is gone and merrily keeps indexing the files. As a result we can end up with lots of worthless connections from the same person all running at the same time.

You can help very easily here. In Outlook, there is a checkbox in "Advanced" that says "Leave Mail on Server" which you will probably find is checked. We have no problem with that, but you must also check the one that says "Remove after xx days" and put something reasonable in there like a week or two.

If you are using webmail for your mailbox instead of Outlook, we can delete messages older than a certain date for you if it's too difficult or time consuming to do yourself. Just send a message to customerservice@icglink.com for assistance.