Mail washing.

[Cranfield]

What influences the time it takes to "wash mail" ?
I have just waited 3 minutes for a single brief email to be washed, yet another time 5 - 10 get washed in seconds.
Not a major problem, but I am interested.

[Digerati]

There are too many variables, with several moving bottlenecks. One of the biggest (or most restrictive) bottleneck is probably the distant end (your mail provider's mail server and connection). Other factors include your connection.

And it depends on what is meant by "wash". Deleting those selected for deletion should be pretty quick. Checking the "keepers" for maliciousness will take longer - again depending on the distant end. The size of the email will matter too as well as your throttle setting.

Since you said some other times it is quick, that would not suggest there is a problem with your system. However, it would not hurt to make sure you system up fully updated, free of malware, and you have an ample supply of free disk space too.

[dearwebby]

Most likely you have a huge blacklist. Dump it! Make it age off in ONE day. No spammer forges any address, except yours, more than once. The blacklist is pretty useless. Worst are filters that add addresses to the blacklist. Don't do that! Your blacklist should only contain your mother-in-law and certain ex-lovers. That's it, no more than that! After you fix that, MailWasher will do it's work in seconds.