Go Dawgs,
By default the setting of 10 minutes has been determined by HP to be the optimum lowest setting to reduce the overall overhead on the network system and to also make the most reliable and lowest throughput for the mail and application server. As designed, at the predetermined interval the cached mail is sent out in a batch form to reduce network traffic. Due to the ping and response times the overhead on both the mail server and the ALM application increases considerably once the settings are reduced to below the recommended default setting and in rare cases of network overload or high throughput/ traffic, the mails may be lost and not be sent correctly.

Hope this helps,
Dan

There is a Site Parameter, MAIL_INTERVAL which is set to 10 minutes by default but could be reduced to 1. It is described in the ALM 12.01 Administrator Guide as follows:

![alt text][1]

[1]: /storage/temp/468-mail-interval-description.png