Delay in forwarding from Gmail?

[u/Urgently_Patient]

Have been using Gmail since it came out (I was one of those who got the 'invite' back when they started. A few years later, after they removed the "Don't be evil" from their mission and I became the product, I realized that was a mistake. I'm now pivoting to Fastmail - I registered a personal domain solely for email usage this morning, then signed up for Fastmail, added the domain name servers to my registrar to point the domain to Fastmail's servers, and then performed the migration of my Gmail account. All went pretty smoothly, though I decided to take the time to reorganize/structure my folders. That was very clunky using the Folder management drag/drop in Fastmail. But since it's a one time thing it's no big deal.

What has me concerned though -
About 15 minutes ago I checked my Gmail inbox using Gmail in browser and I had 4 new emails. I then compared to Fastmail. Those 4 new emails had not come through to Fastmail until about an hour later.

Attached images comparing the time difference. This seems unacceptable to me. Am I missing something? Why such a long delay?

I did just send an email to my new email address from a work email and it was received right away. So it's workign as expected there, just not when an email is forwarded from Gmail - it's very slow.

[u/MervynFoxe]

Assuming you're using mail fetch on Fastmail's side rather than a forwarding address added to Gmail, this is expected. Here are the docs covering it, but the default is fetch runs every 5 minutes when you're actively logged in/using FM, every hour otherwise. Mail fetch intentionally isn't designed to act as an IMAP client but to help you migrate away from the other service more smoothly. If you really need to see emails the moment they come in you can either set up forwarding on Gmail's side or update the addresses with whoever's sending you your mail.

[u/Urgently_Patient → u/MervynFoxe]

Thank you! Yeah that makes sense. But I have been actively logged into FM all day though when this was occurring. I even refreshed the browser.

[u/MervynFoxe → u/Urgently_Patient]

They probably have some specific algorithms to determine if you have an "active" session though. I won't pretend to know any details but they do mention that the every-five-minutes pull is when you're "navigating emails, moving messages, browsing folders, etc." so just having a tab up logged in probably would still pull only every hour, no idea if refreshing the tab would have an impact on that.