Each day, District employees make tens of thousands of requests to read and receive email on their computers. Each request requires the email service to scan the entire contents of a person's mailbox on the District's email server to determine which email messages to send to a person's computer.

In some cases, the huge volume of simultaneous requests has caused our email system to slow down or lock up. This article will address how you can help resolve this problem by changing your Eudora settings to check for emails less frequently.

The amount of time and computer resources required for the email service to scan a person's mailbox and determine which messages have not been previously read is directly affected by the amount of messages in a person's mailbox on the email server. The larger the number of messages in the person's mailbox, the longer it takes to transfer the email messages to a person's computer. So deleting messages you have already read and no longer need will improve server performance.

Currently, there are two options for checking to see if you have new email messages:

• Manually click the "Check Email" icon in your Eudora email client.


• Have the Eudora email software automatically check for new email based upon the time interval specified in the Eudora Tools/Options menu.

Based on the frequency in which email is retrieved from the main email server, it appears that a significant majority of people have set the time interval in their Eudora client to check their email every minute. This means that every minute a request to check for unread email messages is made to the District email server.

With nearly 3,000 active District email accounts, even if only a quarter of the accounts have this one-minute setting, 750 requests to read email are made every minute (45,000 an hour). In the course of a 10-hour workday, that represents nearly a half-million requests to retrieve email messages. This is the major contributing factor resulting in erratic and unpredictable performance of the email service.

While email is an important communication tool in the District, setting your Eudora to check for new email every minute appears to be unnecessary.

To improve email performance for everyone, all District employees are asked to change their Eudora email client to check email every 15 minutes as their default option. You always have the option to click on the "Check Email" icon anytime you want. See sidebar for instructions.

If you have questions, please contact the ETS Call Center at x8324. Your cooperation in this matter is greatly appreciated.