Why Does Clean Email Sometimes Slow Down?
Although Clean Email has the capacity to process thousands of messages per second, processing slow-downs happen when your email provider requires us to process fewer messages at a time, or to increase the delay between sending requests.
Even though, for example, Clean Email can instruct your email provider to “delete these 10,000 messages now”, your provider may refuse to process that many messages in a short period. Each email provider has distinct limitations on the way third parties such as Clean Email can interact with your mailbox. Clean Email’s proprietary tools allow us to optimize these interactions for each provider and process messages as fast as possible, but we are still subject to the limitations set by your provider.
Detailed Information
As a third-party email service, Clean Email communicates with your email provider programmatically, using APIs or the IMAP protocol. These communications typically consist of pre-defined requests sent by third parties, such as “move these messages”, and automated responses from your email provider such as “messages moved successfully”. We do not display these responses to you directly, but our system relies on them to know when an action has been completed successfully.
To maintain system stability and performance, all email providers may enforce limitations on programmatic activity such as API requests and IMAP interactions. These limitations can vary for different providers, but may include limiting the number of messages that can be processed in response to a single request, and limiting the number of messages that can be processed in a given period of time.
When Clean Email receives instructions from your mail provider to slow down and retry in a certain amount of time (e.g.,10 minutes), we comply with these instructions and slow down accordingly.
Bear in mind that most email services are not designed to move around or delete thousands of messages at once. The likelihood that your email provider will direct us to slow down our processing of your messages can be affected by a variety of factors, for example:
- The number and age of the messages in your account
- The number of email clients connected to your account at the same time Clean Email is processing some actions (for example, you might access your email from your computer, your phone, and your tablet)
- he number of incoming messages (for example, we receive slow-down instructions from email providers more often during the day than during the night)
- Other services that manage your email, such as custom auto-responder services, emailing cleaning apps, and email analytics services; this can be anything that has access to your mailbox
📌 Note: Slow downs may work both ways: When Clean Email is deleting or otherwise cleaning a large number of messages, you may experience slower performance or issues logging in to your normal email app as well.
Each provider has implemented unique protocols for third-party processing of your email. For example, in a situation when Google would give us exact instructions on the “cool down period”, some other servers may just refuse our connection without any reason returned, or may return only a generic error message.
Clean Email uses custom algorithms and other provider-specific techniques for each email provider to process your actions as rapidly as possible, but sometimes it may take up to 40 attempts to complete the processing. Although we can neither control nor avoid such limits, Clean Email will keep working until it gets the task done.
Please contact us and we will be happy to help.
