BLSHEPinMA said:
I use Outlook 2007, and one of my send/receive accounts is to my gmail
address. Just today I noticed several messages on my web-based gmail that
did not get downloaded into outlook when I opened it. There is no pattern to
what was excluded, and they are not in my outlook junkmail folder. This
makes me very nervous! How many other messages have I missed, since I do not
usually check from gmail on the web first? What can I do to find the source
of the problem? Thanks,
I am on Windows XP home edition version 5.1
Gmail will get screwed up. At some point, you may see nothing gets
downloaded into a local e-mail client although there are new mails
sitting in the Inbox in your webmail account at Gmail. There are no
errors in the local e-mail client. If you enable troubleshooting
logging in the e-mail client, you'll see the client issuing a LIST
command to get a list of current items in the mailbox on the server.
Gmail responds with a null list (a single period character in the first
position on the first line returned as the list). This tells the client
that there are no items in the mailbox. This list isn't just of new
items but all items (it is up to tracking in the client to remember what
message-IDs it downloaded before to determine which items in the mailbox
are new; i.e., "new" is defined by the client, not the server). Since
the client was told there are no items in the mailbox, the client has
nothing to download so it ends the mail session with a good status.
After all, the vast majority of your mail polls probably end up with
nothing found in your mailbox because you haven't gotten any yet. So
being told there are no items in the mailbox is still a good status to
the client.
So you have Gmail telling the client that there are no items in the
mailbox when you can, in fact, see there are items when you use their
webmail interface. What I've done in the past was to delete or move out
all items in the Inbox folder and thereafter Gmail seems smart enough to
figure out how to properly report to the LIST command from the client
when there are items in its Inbox.
Gmail does not support POP correctly. There are lots of anomalies in
behavior. For example, use their webmail interface to send an e-mail
and then poll with your e-mail client to find that sent item turns up in
your Inbox. That is because Gmail will proffer as new mails the items
you sent which are then copied into their All Mails folder. See
http://groups.google.com/group/24ho...28199c13fc9/3a2754214abff1c0#3a2754214abff1c0.
Gmail really doesn't support POP as everyone else knows it (i.e., as
defined by RFCs and implemented in real e-mail clients). Instead it
should be referred to as gPOP: Gmail's version (or bastardization) of
POP. It doesn't take much beyond the simple setup (which is used by the
vast number of users) to expose problems with their particular flavor of
POP. They also seem to have a problem keeping the webmail and POP
counts in sync. It hasn't happened a lot but then I get very few mails
through my Gmail account, but it does happen and wiping the Inbox folder
using their webmail interface usually fixed it (but then I was probably
also wiping the All Mails, junk, and trash folders, too).
