Long delay receiving mail at start up with Exchange Server

I have seen an number of people having an issue with long delays at launch of Mail, iCal, or Address Book. One common cause of this issue is an invalid autodetect configuration on the Exchange Server. When any of the three applications listed above launch, they check the autodetect configuration to see if there have been any changes to the Exchange Servers configuration - for example, an upgrade to the location of the server, or administrative settings. In some cases this information is not configured correctly - for example, the autodetect server is listed with the LAN local name. If you are not on the same LAN, which will never happen if you have a hosted mail service, Mail and the other applications will hang on that mailbox/directory until the query times out - which can be a long, long time.

The only solution is to get the Exchange Server administrator to check the autodetect configuration - and it is important that they check the configuration both internal to your network and from the Internet - and fix it if broken.