by Pete Wright
By all accounts I can find, Apple has sold roughly a million iPhones since it launched on June 29. That makes a million people setting up the new phones in the US alone, and what is likely a healthy percentage using the Gmail email service.
Personally, I have about six Gmail accounts including those through the Google Apps for your Domain service, and I’ve recommended and installed a number for clients. So, given the popularity of the new phone and the email service it was something of a stun to find just how completely insane the two work — sort of — together.
In my case, I have two computers — a laptop and a desktop — and now the iPhone. In my ideal setup, I’d have all my mail download on the desktop, and new mail on the laptop and the iPhone; one would be the archive, and the other two would be my transient accounts.
But in the default setup, regardless of how you set up the Gmail account, mail only downloads once — once on each client — and then gets frozen, never downloaded again.
According to Google, that’s a feature. But it’s a funny one. It presumes that users will be spending more time on the website than downloading via POP.
Turns out, it’s a simple fix that introduces even more complications. In your POP settings, if you update your user login to include “recent:login@gmail.com,” you trigger this new “Recent Mode” which downloads all messages for the last 30 days. I did this to all three of my machines and, as advertised, all mail from the last 30 days downloaded.
All mail.
600+ messages per account.
Once I got through the process of deleting 600 messages on my iPhone (not an easy task by the way), things started clipping right along. All mail comes into all devices all the time. Of course, that really does mean ALL mail. Even mail I send on my iPhone gets delivered to the other two accounts. I guess that’s a good thing — how come it feels like such a nuissance?
