Mail sends emails slowly

[AzureCloud]

Hello all,

I have been suffering from this issue with Mail for a long time, and I have finally decided to attempt to seek out a resolution. I have noticed that since I began using MobileMe, Mail has taken an extraordinarily long time to send emails. It takes at least a minute to send around 5 lines of text, which seems rather excessive. I have noticed this on Leopard (10.5.8) and Snow Leopard (10.6.1). When I send emails from my MobileMe account on my iPhone, it takes seconds, so I haven't noticed any similar issues there. I opened up the connection doctor in Mail and found that it took a long time to report a successful connection to both MobileMe and the MobileMe smtp server. I allowed Snow Leopard to automatically set up my mail account, so I don't believe that it is an issue with settings. Has anyone experienced something similar, and is there a fix I could try?

 

[Amdahl]

First guess: Lower the MTU on your Built-in Ethernet (System Preferences->Network->Built-in Ethernet->Advanced->Ethernet)to 1400 and see if the problem goes away.

 

[AzureCloud]

Thanks for the suggestion, Amdahl, but it still hasn't made a difference. I tried sending a test email and it took as long as before...

 

[pasipple]

I just migrated to Mac from a PC three months ago...and I would say I have experienced the same issue. I just thought that maybe "that's the way it was" with Mac and "Mail".

Just plain text messages (short ones) take 15-20 seconds to send...whereas...with a PC and Outlook they would go instantaneously.

Don't know if this is the norm or not! I tried the suggestion to lower my MTU to 1400 and I see no difference.

 

[Amdahl]

Put your MTU back to normal, if you changed it and it didn't fix the problem.

If you go to this address, http://www.whatsmyip.us/reversedns.php do you get a result that indicates your ISP, or just an IP number? If just an IP number, that could be the problem. ISP issue.

 

[AzureCloud]

I have found the solution to my problem after a bit of checking on Apple's support site. They mention that the port used for the SMTP server for MobileMe can be 25 or 587. I checked the setting on Mail and it was set to "Use Default Ports" or something similar, which meant it defaulted to using 25. I set it to use 587 as a custom port, and emails send instantaneously now. I suppose it had to do with the ISP blocking or throttling port 25? Anyway, thanks for the help Amdahl, I'm glad to finally have normal mail behavior.

 

[southerndoc]

Just changed mine to 587. It's pretty fast now. Thanks!