Tuesday, 4th March 2008Reduce Exchange POP3 Connector Download Time
How to shorten the amount of time Exchange waits before downloading via the POP3 Connector
Ever been frustrated by minimum time limit on the Exchange 2003 POP3 Connector? In my humble opinion for many businesses, 15 minutes is way too long.
In an era when people are used to being able to send and recieve an email while on the phone, I'm very suprised at this limitation.
Fortunately help is at hand with a simple registry tweak:
- Open the Registry Editor ( go to START > RUN and type REGEDIT, Click OK )
- Locate and then click the following registry subkey: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/SmallBusinessServer/Network/POP3 Connector”
- On the “Edit” menu, point to “New”, and then click “DWORD Value”.
- Type “ScheduleAccelerator” as the entry name, and then press ENTER.
- On the “Edit” menu, click “Modify”.
- In the “Value data” box, type the value that you want, and then click “OK” (as we're only using the first digit column, it doesn't matter if the number type is Hexadecimal or Decimal). The value you type in here essentially divides the default value ( 15 minutes ) - so typing in 3 as the value will give you a new interval of 5 minutes ( because 15 minutes divided by 3 equals 5). Personally I recommond going no lower than 5 minutes as it can strain POP3 servers at the other end (depending on the number of mailboxes in your system).
- Edit the Registry Editor
- Restart the “Microsoft Connector for POP3 Mailboxes” service..
One thing to note when setting the interval however is that it has been known to produce some slightly erratic results, causing in some cases the POP3 Connector to attempt downloads every 1 minute or so. If possible its worth trying to keep an eye on the connector in the first few polls of operation just to make sure you are getting the behaviour expected.