Thank you, roncerr. I must have a slightly different version than you do, but your input helped me find it. I just bought a Dell laptop that came with W7 and I'm at the bottom end of the learning curve here.
For anyone else that may have my version, what I found was a small icon at the upper right that flagged as "Menus (Alt+M)" and in that selection I found "Options." In the "Options" box that launched there was no "Send Receive Messages," but in the "General" tab that came up there is a place to "Check for messages every" followed by a dialog box to change the default 30-minutes to whatever you desire.
Thanks again, I likely would never have found that without your pointing me in the right direction.