I hadn’t run Entourage in a long time since it totally kills the overall performance of my Mac. Today, for some reason, I decided to try it again, and I was also, for some likewise unknown reason, inspired to turn off the ‘check mail every 20 minutes’ feature (this is done by disableing the “Send and Receive All” schedule item).
Lo and behold, this makes a huge performance improvement. No longer does it seem to sit there and hang on my ‘archive’ folder (which has a copy of every message I recieve at work). It also continues to notify me of new mails in a timely manner.
I suspect that the schedule is there for people who use IMAP and POP accounts. Makes sense, since that’s a pretty standard feature of mail clients these days. But if you’re only using Exchange, it seems to know how to poll the exchange server already, so it can be safely turned off.
Now it checks mail once in a while, but takes at most 15 seconds to do it. Quite an improvement from consuming 50% for hours on end.