Changing Mail.app Check New Messages Frequency to Every 2 mins?

Question

I'm running Lion 10.7.3 with Mail.app 5.2.
In Mail > Preferences > General
There's a setting to change "Check for New Messages" with a pulldown for every 1 minute, every 5 mins, etc.
Is there a way, possibly via terminal settings, to change this to check for new messages every two minutes?
The reason for this is that I currently have my mail.app set to check email every minute for all my accounts. It mostly works, however, occasionally this is too many requests for my mail server and I get the dreaded pop-up requesting the password for the account. When this happens, all mail checking is stopped until I confirm the password (which is already correct) or cancel the request. It's a pain because I'm not always at my computer to instantly confirm this and then it can go hours without checking mail. Thus, checking mail every two minutes might work perfectly. Every 5 minutes seems a bit too long.
Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

Mike Mcgee wrote:
It mostly works, however, occasionally this is too many requests for my mail server and I get the dreaded pop-up requesting the password for the account. When this happens, all mail checking is stopped until I confirm the password (which is already correct) or cancel the request. It's a pain because I'm not always at my computer to instantly confirm this and then it can go hours without checking mail. Thus, checking mail every two minutes might work perfectly. Every 5 minutes seems a bit too long.
Actually Mike underestimates the annoyance -- Mail quite easily gets itself into a snit where it keeps asking for the password over and over, and the only way to get it out of the loop is to quit Mail and relaunch it.  For those of us with 9 mailboxes, and we've got it set so that mail does not remember passwords, this is annoying!  (Why do I have 9 mailboxes and don't save any passwords?  Because I used to have 10 mailboxes opened, and relied on the saved passwords, and then one time they got wiped out and I realized that I had clean forgotten one of them.  I made the decision to always put passwords in manually so that I will not forget them.  When you get to be old and senile you will use these tricks, too.)
But, anyway, Mike's original problem is that a 1-minute check time breaks mail and he is annoyed by this.  If he goes through all the hoops to hack it to 2 minutes, he might just find himself in exactly the same place and need to set it back to 5 anyway.  Nathan, I'm glad you work somewhere that management is willing to spend cash updating mail servers so that your spam gets instantly delivered, but my management wants to spend money on other things.