[is not]

My main problem is using Mac OSX Mail app to access my iCloud mail account. It usually peaks at 10 Kbps, so glacially slow. It's actually faster for me to log in to the iCloud site and read the e-mail there, which is something I don't like to have to do. Is not convenient, from an user experience perspective, checking out the email over web at home is a thing of the past to me.

So, given how my experience is totally different on the web side, I wonder if there is anything wrong on my end. I doubt it, but my accounts are set as IMAP, I keep reading POP is yesterday's news and doesn't make any sense anymore, but my Gmail account, which is set as IMAP too albeit under Thunderbird is also terribly slow (10Kbps.)

It happens always like this, in order to those accounts become usable, this needs to be fixed. I just don't know how to achieve it.

It can take minutes just to display the content of one e-mail. I am not talking about big e-mails, 1 MB on size is all it takes for it to become a 'painfully' experience.

So, for those with actual knowledge, any bets on what part of it is slow? I read somewhere that it might be latency in the mail portal, but I don't know iota about what is running on the background of this mess.

Thanks

[besson3c]

There isn't much you can do if you are able to reproduce this in multiple clients.

A lot of webmail systems contact a proxy server, sometimes on the same server where the IMAP server resides so that the more scalable non-encrypted communication can be used. So, you are contacting the IMAP servers on possibly different ports, and connecting via the proxy servers which might be load balanced differently. All of these variables can result in a totally different experience as far as performance goes.

All you can do really is wait until this is resolved on the server end. That being said, your bandwidth speed calculations may not be the best way to determine that performance is poor, because with accessing individual messages that are on average very small in size you will be getting little bursts of bandwidth, and not enough of a sample size to come up with a meaningful measurement. You can sort of assess the performance of your bandwidth with reading a large email attachment for the first time, but there are other variables to consider too such as your client's attachment decoding overhead, and other client specific sorts of things.

I'm not saying that your connection isn't slow. If it feels slow compared to accessing another IMAP server there probably are performance bottlenecks, I'm just saying that it is pretty hard to come up with a sort of smoking gun test that will tell you anything useful that you can use to prove that the problem exists beyond simply experiencing it first hand.

[is not]

Thanks besson.

I tested this slowness with an email from a friend on my iCloud account, two photos of the new iPad, about 12MB on size the full email. Mail (v5.2 - Lion latest) still downloads at 10kbps whereas webmail on iCab downloaded at +300kbps.

Thanks again

[is not]

It is not only iCloud, is whatever IMAP account I am using.

And as almost any email client I try setups the accounts as IMAP this is so slow!

I was able to setup a POP gmail account only on Powermail 6, and worked freaking fast! So definitely I believe that IMAP is broken on (my) Lion.

[besson3c]

What exactly is slow? Opening messages? Opening attachments? Checking for new messages?

[is not]

Hello again besson

It is slow downloading them. I installed menumeters to make a comparison, POP account on PowerMail downloads at full speed while IMAP accounts do at 10kb/s

Thanks again.

[besson3c]

If this is happening with all IMAP accounts, maybe your ISP is throttling your bandwidth on this port? Have you tried jumping on a different network?

[is not]

Thanks again.

I'll try and comment!