iCod said:
does anyone know how to make outlook automaticaly read email
on opening the program rather than having to click send/receive?
Configure Outlook to schedule periodic polls of your accounts. When you
configure it to, say, poll every 10 minutes then the zeroeth minute
(when it loads) is included.
Tools -> Send/Receive -> Send/Receive Settings -> Define Send/Receive Groups
If you want to force a poll when you want (i.e., do a manual poll),
enable the F9 key option. If you want Outlook to schedule periodic
polls, select the time interval and enable the schedule option. Set the
offline settings the same way unless you truly want Outlook to remain
offline even if you hit the F9 key or the poll interval elapses.
Don't set the poll interval lower than 5 minutes. It can be seen as
abusive by a free e-mail provider. Outlook will not wait to finish a
mail poll if during one the time elapses and the next poll time comes
up. That is, if you are downloading some large e-mails and had the poll
interval at only 1 minute, the e-mails might be downloading and, bang,
another mail poll starts after the 1 minute interval. This means your
current poll gets interrupted and another starts. You don't finish
downloading during the current poll event so they get discarded and you
start to download those items again. You end up continually trying to
re-download the same large e-mails. You never when some boob attaches a
huge video file (that is within the quota limit of your e-mail provider
for e-mail size). E-mail transfer is a lot slower than HTTP or FTP
downloads, and there is no resume function. Besides, if you are getting
so many e-mails that you need to know immediately when they arrive, can
you really read a whole bunch of e-mails in under 5 minutes?
You can configure Outlook to not download the entire e-mail and just get
its headers. For each account, decide if you want Outlook to download
the complete item or just its headers. Yeah, that means you won't end
up having to get stuck with downloading huge e-mails that you might not
want just because someone wanted to send you a video of the birth of
their child but it also means you will now have to mark each e-mail that
you do want and then do another manual poll (or wait until the next
scheduled one) to get the body of the e-mail to read it. Anyone that
sends me oversized e-mails gets trained not to do so. I'll tell them
that I won't accept e-mails from them anymore if they continue being
impolite, tell them to store their large file somewhere online (and give
some example sites), and to insert a hyperlink to their big file in the
e-mail. Then I get their e-mail and *I* can decide whether or not I
want to retrieve their big file.
There is also the problem of the mail servers getting overly busy.
Hotmail, for example, when it gets too busy may accept and start a mail
session but then abort it during the handshaking (authentication) step.
E-mail clients don't get much status back. For POP3, there are only 2
statuses: OK and ERR. IMAP has a couple more status codes but still
insufficient to clearly identify the cause of an error. If the client
gets back an ERR during the handshaking part of the mail session, and
because the comments added to statuses aren't standardized to ensure the
client knows what happened, the client only knows the authentication
step failed. You get a bogus alert from your e-mail client claiming
your login credentials were wrong when, in fact, it was the server that
chose to abort the mail session during the handshaking process and not
because it even got to asking for USER and PASS. The more often you
poll then the more often you'll hit this bogus alert.
I set my mail poll interval to 10 minutes. That eliminates abusing a
[free] mail server. It reduces how many times I get the bogus alert
claiming my logon was incorrect. It allows sufficient time for the slow
transfer of e-mail to retrieve any that may have huge attachments.
