Email synching fo hours

[Yozzer]

Stated a few weeks ago. Sending emails can take anything from a minute to overnight, and yesterday afternoon, I sent a really important email which I left for two hours synching. This morning I got a reply, but my PC says it was sent, but looking online at my web email account at virgin, there is no sign of it anywhere. The very slow synching is bad enough, but relying on Virgin email is getting a real concern. I have installed both Mailbird, and recently bought Outlook, but both have the same issues of slow synching. Any suggestions?

[coenoby]

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@Yozzer wrote:

 Any suggestions?

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No golden bullets I'm afraid.

However, assuming that you are using IMAP with those email clients.and seeing the same issue across a number of email clients it sounds as if the problem is possibly down to:

• slow broadband or wifi
• an extremely large number of emails in your VM email account (especially if there are a lot with large attachments)
• or a combination all the above.

It might be worth checking here https://www.virginmedia.com/help/service-status to see if there are any local issues with the VM services in your area.

I use Outlook, Bluebird and Thunderbird and don't have any issues with my VM (Ntlworld and Virginmedia.com) email accounts. However, to be fair I don't use any of them as my main email accounts so none of them have a large number of emails on the VM server.

Coenoby

[Yozzer]

Many thanks for your response. I do use IMAP, the broadband speed is 250, but yes I do have a large number of emails, so might have hit a threshold. I will go online and delete some.

I will let you know how it goes.

[coenoby · Accepted solution]

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@Yozzer wrote:

the broadband speed is 250,

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Thanks for coming back, sorry for my delay in replying.

So does that just mean you have a VM M250 fibre broadband package or is that the result of a speedtest?

If you have not run a test of the speed you are actually getting try this one - https://samknows.com/realspeed/  or this might be more helpful https://speedtest.samknows.com/ 

Coenoby

[Yozzer]

Thanks again for your response.

I am on M250, and I checked the speed using your second link, and in fact I got 270, with upload 18.

On the virgin web site it showed I was using about 25% of the space allocated, but I spent an hour yesterday deleting old mail, and the same today, and at the moment the send and the receive with a couple of emails were virtually instantaneous, which is how it used to be, so hopefully it wills stay that way, we will see. I will continue cleaning out my old mail.

[coenoby]

@Yozzer 

Glad to hear things are back to normal.

For what it's worth, VM say that on M250 you should see average download speed of 264Mbps and average upload of 25Mbps.

I'm on M250 and right now the samknows.com speed test shows I'm getting 271 and 27.1

In all honesty, if your VM email account is only 25% full I would not have expected that to be an issue so personally I would not stress too much about deleting lots more emails 😉

It is also worth saying that when you set up an IMAP account in an email app or client it can take a while to synch the first time that you run it but it then settles down after that.

Anyway, I'm glad it seems to be ok at the moment. If you do see the synch process hanging again it might be worth running the speedtest again just to see if you have an intermittent issue with your broadband.

If in the future you do see the speed drop significantly there is a board on this forum dedicated to those specific issues. https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/bd-p/Speed so you could create a post with the details there. The experienced forum members there will be best placed to help you with any problems in  that department.

Coenoby

[jem101]

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@Yozzer wrote:

Thanks again for your response.

I am on M250, and I checked the speed using your second link, and in fact I got 270, with upload 18.

On the virgin web site it showed I was using about 25% of the space allocated, but I spent an hour yesterday deleting old mail, and the same today, and at the moment the send and the receive with a couple of emails were virtually instantaneous, which is how it used to be, so hopefully it wills stay that way, we will see. I will continue cleaning out my old mail.

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What can happen, (and I’m not necessarily saying that this is the case here), is that a particular email message has something about it that your email client takes a violent dislike to, and chokes up trying to download it. Eventually the stalled process times out and the rest of the emails are downloaded - from the user’s perspective, it does just look as if the whole process is taking a silly amount of time. 

I’ve certainly seen Outlook do this in a corporate environment, in fact I’ve seen Outlook crash completely trying to sync a ‘dodgy’ message!

It is possible that from the webmail interface, you happen to have deleted the offending message and hence, it now all appears to work properly.

John

[Yozzer]

Thanks for that John, I will keep that in mind. My concern is due to the fact I am having a serious disagreement with our local hospital, so delays and the possibility of losing an email is important to me, and I do appreciate the tips and help I have been given, bearing in mind at the moment the symptoms are new and strange to me, as I have only had very minor issues over the last few decades or so with my email.