Not getting Gmail to two computers

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Our family has a Gmail Account. Defined as a POP3 account. My wife and I have our own PC’s and we used to each get emails from the same GMail Account. She runs Outlook, I run Windows Live Mail. In each of our PC’s, the Gmail Account is defined to leave mail on the server for 55 days… this gives the other of us ample time to get around to requesting our copies of mail from that Gmail Account (really done everyday, until we have Vacation or something…). Now, however… She does not get the emails that I have gotten and I don’t get the ones she has. I don’t know what has changed to cause this, but it isn’t working the way it used to. From a browser, we can see all the emails still on the Gmail servers… Any help/direction appreciated.. TIA.

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It may be a change at the Google end. Check the POP3 settings via the web page.

cheers, Paul

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Our family has a Gmail Account. Defined as a POP3 account. My wife and I have our own PC’s and we used to each get emails from the same GMail Account. She runs Outlook, I run Windows Live Mail. In each of our PC’s, the Gmail Account is defined to leave mail on the server for 55 days… this gives the other of us ample time to get around to requesting our copies of mail from that Gmail Account (really done everyday, until we have Vacation or something…). Now, however… She does not get the emails that I have gotten and I don’t get the ones she has. I don’t know what has changed to cause this, but it isn’t working the way it used to. From a browser, we can see all the emails still on the Gmail servers… Any help/direction appreciated.. TIA.

Hi RobG,

It sounds like the message download status is out of sync in Outlook and Windows Live Mail. POP3 doesn’t natively support storing message status info on the mail server so the status is recorded by the local mail client. I don’t know of a way to force Outlook/Live Mail to re-sync, and even then, it would likely cause all of the message still in the mail server inbox to be seen as unread (not by Gmail, but by the local mail client).

If the risk of loosing the message status is okay, one option is to first back up the existing messages in the local inbox to a local mail folder. Next delete the POP3 account from Outlook and then recreate it. The newly added account will see all the messages left in your Gmail inbox as new.

Based on your current setup and usage, switching from POP3 to IMAP would be a better long term solution. The “leave mail on server” feature of POP3 really only works well with a single computer and POP3 wasn’t designed to handle multiple mail clients at the same time so there’s always the risk of lost or hidden emails due to race conditions. IMAP supports bidirectional sync so message status is stored on the mail server (and cached on the client side).

Chung

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