When configuring Appian to receive emails (in order to kick off a process by ema

You can publish your process models as web services and then call them that way. This will give you the instant response you need.

You can also increase the time between email polling to reduce traffic but at the expense of longer time delays.

I'm not too familiar with the web service method.... I'm aware that process models can be published as web services, but how would the sending of an email tie in with that web service?

Your use case mentions starting processes from emails that have been sent to an address that Appian is configured to poll.

If these emails are automated from other systems or actions you could, with extra development, use the web service method for quicker response.

Maybe you could tell us more about your scenarios

I don't know all the details yet (we're still pretty new with our Appian processes), but I'm fairly certain there isn't a possibility for extra development on sending side of things. I was hoping that there might be another way to configure things on the Appian side.

You can extend the poller interval, but we are really talking about minimal traffic here. The poller is just another client that connects to the mail server via IMAP, think about all the traffic that is generated on your company mail server by all mobile mail clients.