In the prior blog entry I talked about moving my domain for email over to GMail. Hosting my website at Dreamhost makes this simple.  I configured Gmail to allow POP access and changed my settings in Entourage to use the Gmail POP and SMTP settings.  It all seemed to work fine, except I notice that not all the emails were being downloaded.  When I checked my Gmail Inbox using a browser, I found messages there that did not download.

It was difficult to find out what was going on.  It seems that unlike most POP clients, with Gmail when any device downloads using POP, it marks the message as downloaded and then when another device tries to download the message, it does not download.  I had my iPhone setup for POP access, as well as using an app in MyYahoo to see the messages.  I view this to be a issue with Gmail that should have been fixed since all other POP clients can tell if a different device is attempting a download.

So how to fix?  I found this information: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47948

Basically you setup the mail client by adding “recent” in front of the username, as in “recent:name@gmail.com”.  You have to also leave a copy on the server, but that is true for all POP clients if you want to download to multiple devices.

When I added the “recent:” in front of my user name, I was able to get a bunch of messages.  I have to see how this works and see if I get multiple messages in my Inbox.