I thought I would post to the forum to possibly help eM Client users of Google Apps and Gmail. Google handles sent mail in a very unique manner which can greatly help with sent mail.
Typically, with almost every email client on the planet, there is an option to “Save a copy of sent messages in “Sent” folder”. This is important to do since we all want our sent email to be stored in our sent folder. However, this results in two connections when sending email. As an example, let’s send a 10MB email. The first connection is an SMTP connection to the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) to send the email. A second connection is made with the IMAP server to send and store a copy of the email in the “Sent” folder. So, 20MB of bandwidth and the time to send that email is consumed.
Google, in what I consider to be somewhat brilliant, chose to automatically take email delivered to the MTA for sending and store a copy in the Sent folder. They also realize that almost every email client will still save another copy via IMAP, so the duplicate copy is automatically deleted (also rather brilliant). This means that you can (and should!) uncheck the box to “Save a copy of sent messages in “Sent” folder” in your options. You can test this. Go to your sent folder and send an email. You will likely briefly see two copies in Sent, then one disappears. Uncheck the box and send a message and you’ll see a copy show up in Sent.
This really means that your mail will send in half the time and with half the bandwidth usage. Very useful on mobile devices where data usage is a factor. Make the same change on your mobile device email client (I use the stock email app on Android) and you will realize the same benefit.
This behavior is not “normal”, and would be actually quite difficult on traditional email servers where MTA’s and IMAP servers do not really talk to each other (Postfix and Dovecot on Linux for example). This explains why it is the default on email clients to save copies to sent folders. eM Client gives the option to disable that, which is very nice.
Hope this helps the community in some way - I know it helped me and my company make better use of our time and bandwidth, especially on mobile devices. Sending large emails will be a very pronounced improvement.
CP
