Let's say you have a workflow which has " wait for 2 minutes and email someone" activity as the first activity on the workflow. You'll be waiting for a long time but why is not this e-mail sent instantly?
If it's in your spam folder, that's none of our business :P But I can say that MOSS 2007 checks the status of the workflow every 5 minutes by default.
If you want to shorten this period, stsadm.exe will be at your service.
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname "job-workflow" -propertyvalue "every 1 minutes between 0 and 59" -url http://localhost
This command will set the checking period to one minute instead of 5 minutes. Like the command above
stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname "job-immediate-alerts" -url http://yourmosssite -propertyvalue "every 1 minutes between 0 and 59"
command sets the sending period of alert e-mails to one minute instead of 5 minutes.