How do I schedule email fetching?

Common reasons for scheduling fetcher downtime include:

1. Shutting down during business hours to reduce the load on the mail server.
2. Shutting down at scheduled maintenance times during which the mailbox is locked by a process on the mail server.

In most cases, however, scheduling fetcher downtime is not necessary. Most mail servers do not require a lock on a mailbox to do maintenance.

Shutting down during business hours to reduce load on the mail server is not necessary for businesses with small email throughput and may be detrimental to business with large throughput because the mailbox may get too big by the end of the day if not fetched from continuously.

How to Schedule

To schedule daily fetching downtime, visit the Fetcher Configuration page, Configuration > POP or IMAP Fetchers. Click on the schedule icon on the row of the fetcher you are interested in scheduling.

Once on the scheduling page, select schedule daily downtime for this fetcher.

Fill out the information for which days of the week and time span you would like the fetcher to be disabled for. Remember to save your changes.

1. Select days of the week. (Note: It is recommended to not have downtime during weekends.)

2. Shutdown Time is the time when fetcher will be shut down each day.

3. Reactivate Time is when the fetcher will restart fetching emails from the server each day. Both of these fields are input on a 24 hour clock.

Once you save your settings, you will be taken to the Email Fetcher Configurations page.

1.  In the above picture the time is 13:04 pm and in our example schedule suggest the fetcher should be down after 9:00 am.
2.  You can see that currently the fetcher is not fetching emails.  It will start automatically once it is 17:00 from our example.

Operation Details of Fetcher Schedules

When you change a fetcher’s schedule, an event is immediately sent to the fetchers’ process which looks at the new schedule and adjusts the fetcher’s running state accordingly. After this initial event, the your email archiver checks for fetchers that should be turned on or off according to their schedule every five minutes. This means any fetcher can be up to five minutes late when switching states based on its schedule.

If the fetcher Reactivation Time is before the Shutdown Time, the fetcher will shutdown at the specified time and restart at the specified time the next day.

Temporarily Turned off Fetcher vs. Disabled Fetcher
A fetcher that is temporarily turned off due to its schedule is different than a disabled fetcher, and will not be listed in the “Inactive Fetchers” table. This table is reserved for manually deactivated fetchers that will not come back on regardless of their schedules. You can tell which state a scheduled fetcher is in by looking at the “Current Schedule” column of the “Active Fetchers” table on the Fetcher Configuration page.