is McAfee slowing down my email?

Thank you for your suggestions!

I tried temporarily switching off McAfee, downloading a big email and timing how long that takes: 8-9 min/MB, turning McAfee back on.
Ditto for Adaware.
Ditto for Spybot.
Ditto for XP firewall.

I have DSL both at work and at home. No dialup.

If I am in a hurry, I now go into Yahoo and check POP mail there, leaving downloading for a time when the computer can download at its leisure.
I don't depend on yahoo to do everything for me - just its ability to get me my messages faster than I can download them on Outlook/Express.

Is there anything else I can try?

Download (of everything) on ADSL should be much faster (although ADSL also comes in slower and faster varieties). Say the connection speed is 1 Mb/s then a 1 MB mail should be around in 10 seconds minimum, 20-30 seconds in practice and 1 minute at most.

With modern CPU's the computer itself shouldn't be the limiting factor. All you can do: compact your OE folders and clean temporary Internet files. And while you download, can you go to Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del window) and check the CPU usage of all processes running to see if there is anything strange?

Check your connection speed with one or more of the tools found by http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+connection+speed

Did you already contact your ISP on the problem? Some of the information you get by the above suggestions might be useful for them also.

Hope this helps and let us know.


Kees

Hey Kees,

thanks for the suggestions. I generally empty the temp internet file folder after a bout of intense surfing, clean up cookies, check that virusscanner is up to date, my firewall runs 100% of the time, and yes, I have checked task manager but can't (don't understand the tech names) see that there is anything massive running.
ISP not helpful.
Wondered if its cos McAfee is set to scan incoming and outgoing email?
Thanks.

Have you tried turning off the email scan in McAfee? If that does the trick I would download free AVG and give it a whirl.

Sorry about the delay in replying Alan - I'll give your suggestion a whirl and let you know. Am going on vacation and have the usual 1001 things to do, so it may be a couple of weeks before I post again. Hopefully with some good experiences!
Thanks for the suggestions, all!

Right. I tried turning off Email scan in McAfee, that doesn't help at all.
Let me recap the problem: If I send an email with >1MB attachment to myself at (say) hello@hello.com and hello@yahoo.com.
Using the same computer to do the following two operations simultaneously,
- I use Outlook express to download the email to hello@hello.com, and it will take me 8-9 mins to download the email with 1.5MB attachment
- at the same time I have my mail account at yahoo.com open and am downloading the very same email with 1.5MB attachment there, and it takes about 2 mins.

Now, is this weird or what?!

Wait til it starts stealing" your address book and turning pages upside down--McAfee acted like spyware in my computor--I was told uninstall immediately by the manufacturer of my computor--I had had it 3 monthes and everything went topsy turvy. It started out good!

My prior statement assumes you are running all XP updates current and you have at least have 512MB RAM, at least 2.8 GHz Processor; run updated versions of adaware, spybot, CCleaner, and all of that and that your computer is totally disk-defragmented. Good luck.