[Major_Nate]

Well, I changed the settings for mail download interval back to 15 minutes, and sent myself a test email from my exchange email, and sure enough, it took 15 minutes for that little icon on the screen to show "Hotmail: 3", but it never notified me out loud or vibrated, and my phone is on loud. So apparently it will only notify you of new emails if you have the sync schedule set to check for new items as they arrive.