An Apple eMAC user told me he had been waiting for over an hour to download his email with no new messages yet appearing in his inbox of the 21 new messages on the server. When I checked the email server, I did not see any problems there, but did notice a lot of bandwidth to the server was being used by a POP3 connection from the user's site. POP3 is a protocol used to download email. When I checked his mailbox, I found that the first new message was over 90 MB, which was the source of the problem.
On an Apple system running the OS-X operating system, you can configure the Mail program to prompt before downloading messages that are above a specified size. To do so, take the following steps:
- Open the Mail program.
- Click on Mail on the program's menubar.
- Select Preferences.
- Click on the Advanced tab.
- Place a value in the "Prompt me to skip messages over [ ] KB" field. E.g. to skip messages over 50 MB in size you could put 51200 in the field (50 megabytes x 1024 kilobytes/megabyte = 51,200 KB).
- You can then close the Preferences window choosing Save when prompted as to whether you wish to save the changes you have made.
