Mail takes a long time to send messages

I have got the same problem. Since I am using snow leopard, Mail takes far too long to send simple text e-mails. This should happen instantly as was the case before.

So far, no solution yet.

Hi Eric, snow leopard is working fine. Only Mail takes a while to send a simple text e-mail. Very annoying. Anyway, have a nice vacation and in the mean time I hope to find a solution. Regards, AJ

My mail has similar behavior. I noticed it when I got my new computer (MacBook Pro 13') with Leopard. Emails take a LONG time to send. It seems like the little activity twirly thing spins for a long time before it says sending down in the mail activity window. Now I have Snow Leopard, and it is the same. I sent a simple text email earlier with just a few words and it took over 30 seconds to send. I hope someone has a solution or something we can try!

I had the same problem with Leopard quite a few months back where it took a very long time to send. But eventually the problem went away and now it goes out very fast. I think it's just a freak thing. When I updated to snow leopard I didn't have that lag sending mail either. It worked itself out somehow.

I have the same problem since I changed the ISP: Sending takes a 30s lag with Mail.app, but not with Thunderbird.
I suspect a DNS cache problem, because sending a mail right after the first one (after 30s) goes out immediately, like if the name lookup was still cached.

One other interesting finding is, that when I am connected to the office with VPN, mail always goes out immediately.

I have a co-worker who sees the exact same problem (using the same ISP as I do).

Greets, steve

I solved it for me. I simply said, in the accounts, "Use custom port" and set it to 25. What happened was that for some reason, one of the accounts I defined had an SMTP that was not reachable from work. So Snow Leopard then tries all the other standard ports and you have to wait, per port, for a TCP time-out... When applying my trick, and when port 25 relaying is denied, you'll see so instantly after which the next SMTP in the list is tried...

Hope it works for you too.

I had this problem and just got it fixed so thought I'd post up. I have a gmail account and the problem started 3 or 4 days ago.(no recent system changes or anything I can think of that coincided with the problem) An additional symptom is that Mail wasn't showing me new messages anymore either. I could go onto the web server for gmail and there was new emails waiting but even clicking on "Get Mail" wouldn't bring them into Mail.
I found in the Window tab a choice for Activity and one for Connection Doctor. I brought up Activity first and saw 5 items and nothing seemed to be changing on any of them. Got Connection Doctor up and it connected and said everything was fine (you can bring up details to see what ports and such it uses which confirmed that things were going ok) I went back to activity and hit the "stop sign" for all of the activity that was going on with the plan to just stop everything to try sending a new message. I started from the top and about half way through I heard the Zoom of a message going out (Mail had been working on sending the message for the last few minutes) and suddenly new activities were popping up in the list and processing quickly.
I tried a few test messages and everything is working like normal again. I'm guessing something got stuck and that is causing the slow messages at least in my case. Check it out!
I'm on a iMac with Snow Leopard.

One other note is that I use IMAP for my gmail acct so I'm on port 993 and I use SMTP port 25 for sending. Or something like that. Connection doctor showed that it was connecting to both 993 and 25 and settings shows IMAP and 993 and that I use SMTP for outgoing.

Thanks this worked out perfectly for me!!

I binned the RSS feed thing that someone suggested and TWO emails later it all started working just like before - mail sends immediately - THANKS!

...actually binning the RSS feed only offered temporary respite - we're back to 15 seconds to send an email again! - so perhaps you should ignore my previous post!

I am having the same problem w/Mail using SL 10.6.2...messages taking a long time to send (15 to 30 seconds). I changed to Port 25 (was 995 - "Use SSL" remained checked) and outgoing mail began sending immediately. However incoming mail stopped completely. Changing it back to 995 resolved the incoming issue, but outgoing mail again takes forever.

I can confirm the same result listed earlier...an initial e-mail takes a very long time to send, but if I send another one right after that it goes out immediately. Hmmm...