I recently (meaning a couple months ago) dumped my increasingly unreliable and time-consuming self-hosted POP and SMTP email server in favor of one of the big hosted service options available for free from a variety of sources. In my case I looked at several of the more ubiquitous options, and chose to go with Google Apps for my domain. A close second was Windows Live Custom Domains from Microsoft, but a couple missing critical features prevented me from going that route (namely access to my email via POP3). Since I am not worried about either company going away or anything, I went with the one that seems to best fit my needs as far as features and functionality are concerned. Getting the BlackBerry client app for Google mail was another bonus.

However, I ran into two frustrating problems when I set up the Google Mail for greghughes.net and started accessing the email server via POP access from Thunderbird and my BlackBerry Internet service.

First, I found that in some cases, once an email had been downloaded by any POP client, no others had access to download it. This is a problem if you’re relying on having your email available in more than one place as I have taken for granted before.

Second, any emails sent to my own email address - the same one associated with the account - simply would not download via POP3 access, ever. Since my weblog sends email to me from my own email address (as do a couple other apps), this was a real problem. I could not really change the behavior of my applications, since doing so would break other aspects of the systems. Besides, every other mail server with POP3 support had always worked the same way (and worked just fine), so why was Google Mail’s so different?

Well, it turns out there is a not-so-obvious option (not used by default) that allows you to resolve both of these issues. It’s called “recent mode.” Google explains it in their help in the context of the “how do I use multiple clients” issue, but the problem related to POP-ing messages sent to ‘Me’ is resolved as well. The solution relates to putting an overload modifier on the front end of the email account name when you log in (a little weird and probably sloppy, but perfectly functional). It’s explained below. Too bad one can’t just toggle the functionality as a permanent setting in the Google Mail web interface (you can set it for a one-time download option, but it always reverts to the default after that, so it appears the below option is the only way to permanently resolve this).

To solve the problem, you have to modify your login in your POP settings with the overloading prefix:

"yourname@yourdomain.com"

needs to change to:

"recent:yourname@yourdomain.com"

The following information is snipped from the Google GMail help center (since this applies to both the general GMail and Google Apps mail services):

If you’re accessing your Gmail using POP from multiple clients, Gmail’s recent mode makes sure that all messages are made available to each client, rather than only to the first client to access new mail.

Recent mode fetches the last 30 days of mail, regardless of whether it’s been sent to another POP client already.

If you sign in to Gmail using your BlackBerry, you’re signed in to recent mode automatically. For all other POP clients, replace ‘username@gmail.com’ in your POP client settings with ‘recent:username@gmail.com’.

Source: Gmail - Help Center - How should I use POP on mobile or multiple devices?

[tags]email, gmail, pop[/tags]