You should be getting at least a message per second, but sometimes the upload seems to be unbearably slow. There are a number of factors that could be limiting the speed of the upload:
- The speed of your home internet connection uplink is much slower than your downlink. Most home users have between 256kbps (kilobits per second) and 1mbps up, regardless of how fast their download speed is. A speed of 256kbps would give a max upload speed about 32K (kilobytes) per second. If you aren’t sure what your uplink speed is, try a network speed test here: http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
- Google imposes quotas and throttles on the upload of messages, but it never says exactly how much. Basically, Google doesn’t want you to upload too many messages per minute nor too many messages per day. So, if the uploader is going too fast, or if Google’s upload servers are too busy, Google will start rejecting messages with a “service unavailable” message. When this happens, Emailchemy waits a second and then retries the message upload. If you exceed the max allowed for a given 24 hour period, no amount of retrying will work until the quota resets.
- The Google message upload protocol is also a bit wasteful in that as a confirmation to each message uploaded it sends the entire message back to the upload program. This isn’t a huge problem for small messages, but, especially if you have attachments, it can add up.
- Anything else your internet connection being used for while doing the upload will impact the performance too. So, a good thing to do is to avoid file downloads or any kind of streaming from the internet to computers on your home LAN at the time you are doing the upload.