The difference though is that I have no life. I gave up trying to have one years ago for being too expensive and tiring.
Another vote for “continuously.” I get hundreds of e-mails a day related to work and I handle every one via either filing away for reference, immediate response, or flag for future action. I live by my inbox, so to think of having a schedule to check it isn’t even in my worldview at this stage.
The better poll would be “How long can you go without looking at your inbox while on vacation without breaking into a cold, nervous, anxiety-induced sweat.” 
I made it about 5 days without checking while on vacation in Europe this past summer. Otherwise, I would say about about 48 hours.
Sad, in some ways, but it pays well.
Every time my computer or iPhone dings. Since I signed up with Vonage, they send me an email every time someone leaves a message on my home line with the wave file embedded right in the email so I can hear it without dialing my voicemail line.
All day long. But I’m self-employed, and I need to be on the lookout for client e-mails.
I used to have my e-mail client set up with filters that played a sound when client e-mails came in, but I’ve been having . . . issues with my e-mail, so for now I just leave my webmail window open and glance at it now and then (I have 4 monitors, one dedicated to Internet/e-mail). Eventually I’ll go back to the old system.
I also keep TweetDeck and Facebook open all day, because I use those for professional networking as well.
It’s on constantly. My work email is always running in the background when I’m at work, and my home email is always running in the background at home. I’m always at my work computer when I’m at work. I’m always on my home computer when I’m at home.
So I guess the best way for me to answer the question would be I check it as many times as I am sent emails a day. I handle email like most people handle phone calls–I read it as soon as I receive it. Could be 25 or more times a day depending how busy I am and the time of year (I get a lot of emails from family at Christmas).
My work email is always on, my yahoo account is usually up on a tab as well. Also depending on what I’m talking about with my lawyer my gmail account is in another tab.
So when you say “continuously,” what do you mean? I always have it open, but I have to go to that window to check it. I get notifications when I get emails at work on my work account, but not with my personal email–no ding, no little pop-up window at the bottom of my screen. I actually have to refresh the my inbox.
The funny thing is, most of my friends think I’m advanced because I’m it all the time. A lot of them say, oh, I haven’t checked my email because I’d have to turn on my computer and log in. Turn on your computer? Mine’s always on. And unless I have to reboot or something, I’m always logged in. And yet I’m finding here that I’m behind, and there’s another level of email checking!
Boy, my friends are so unconnected.
Tell me about it. I have very few friends IRL who speak geek. Just the other day, a friend who’s been using computers & e-mail for a good 10 years (though he’s upfront about “not being a computer guy”) called me to ask how to get text from a Word file into the body of an e-mail. :rolleyes:
My email is the only tab I always have open, and it all pushes to my phone too, so continuously.
Pffft. Email. I get spam. That’s it.
Except for the “go ahead with the job” kind that I get every three months or so.
I get those 2 weeks later, if I bother looking.
But, hey, you know my phone number dontcha. And don’t text me. I hate that. My phone sounds weird when I get a text.
Continuously – all my e-mail from my main accounts shows up on my Blackberry.
Another vote for continuously - I also have my regular email open all the time (and a little red number shows up beside the icon when a new email comes in). I check my junk email account a couple of times a day; in some ways it’s a better email than my regular one.
I have a browser extension that checks my email so it gets checked each time I open the browser and every 15 minutes whilst the browser is open so 3 times a day or more for me.
Once, maybe twice a month. I get virtually nothing but spam anyway; people who want to talk to me use the phone. My land line phone, since I don’t own a cell phone.
I use an email client (Mail on OS X in my case, Outlook when I was PC) that checks my mail (in this case, a POP and an iMAP account) at specified intervals (every 5 minutes, in my case.) When it gets an email, my computer goes “DING!” and my email icon gets a red bubble with the number of unread emails I have.
Somehow, I suspect limiting this poll to people on SDMB will skew the results.
-D/a
I have one email account pushed, so when I get mails from that one my phone beeps or vibrates, then when I go to look at it, the other two accounts get checked. It saves battery life a little that way, I think, rather then pushing all of them. At work, my work email is always in a tab, so I always know when there’s a new inbox message.
So, I checked “3 or more” a day, but my answer also is pretty much continuously.
Constantly. Whenever I walk by my computer, and on my Droid.
My work email is on all day, so gets checked quite regularly, as I need to be in touch with an array of nurses and doctors across the state, along with hearing from the lawyers and other regulators.
My private email gets checked once or twice in the evening after I’m home, and I don’t do nearly so much corresponding from that mailbox. I may go a few days without checking it when I’m on vacation.
If I don’t check my work email every hour or so it builds up. My Yahoo account I do every day or so, but it has become mostly junk. My Gmail account on my phone, still not very active, pings me when there is new mail.