VanguardLH said:
You mention your ISP (Clearwire). You mention Gmail. So whose e-mail
service are you actually using? Both?
Your ISP has no control over the operation of Google's e-mail service.
So why ask your ISP about problems with Gmail? Your ISP can only help
with the e-mail services that *they* provide.
There are no folders with POP access. POP only understands a mailbox.
ALL your e-mails are in the mailbox. POP has no commands to select or
navigate between folders. It only retrieves messages from a mailbox.
When you use the webmail interface to your account, the server-side
Inbox folder is the mailbox. None of those other server-side folders
are accessible by POP. IMAP will sync with the folders you have defined
in your account and why you got so many folders showing up in Outlook.
You had 6 POP accounts, each with its mailbox, and each had its own
server-side folders but which POP cannot access. When you went to IMAP,
you synchronized to all 5-6 server-side folders (to which you
subscribed) and why the count jumped up to 33 folders across those 6
accounts. So there is nothing strange in the change if folder counts.
Google doesn't obey the RFC standards defining POP so it would be no
surprise that they don't obey RFC standards for IMAP. Their access
protocols should more accurately be called gPOP and gIMAP since Google
has their own definition of how to access their webmail interface. For
example, POP clients issue a RETR (retrieve) followed by a DELE
(delete). Gmail will ignore the DELE, if sent, and instead decide what
to do with an item based on your server-side configuration in your Gmail
account. E-mail clients may send a "TOP n" command to just retrieve the
headers for e-mails and optionally the first n lines of their bodies.
Gmail treats a TOP command like a RETR. Gmail works just well enough to
work with most POP and IMAP clients. It doesn't matter what e-mail
client you use with Gmail as the behaviors are Gmail's.
POP is a simple protocol that was established long before IMAP showed
up. IMAP requires more resources and overhead and sometimes just isn't
implemented well on the server. POP only sees a mailbox, no folders,
and normally follows a RETR with a DELE although you can configure many
e-mail clients to not send the DELE (so you can access that same e-mail
using another e-mail client on the same or different host); however, if
your POP client does send a DELE command then it is up to you to cleanup
your mailbox to prevent from consuming all your disk quota for your
account (some clients have an option to send the DELE command n days
after you retrieve a message to help with cleanup but leave the item in
the mailbox long enough for your other clients to retrieve a copy). POP
has no concept of new versus old for e-mails. All it knows are the
items stored in the mailbox. Your e-mail client tracks what it
retrieved before to know if an item is old or new in the list of items
found currently in your mailbox. IMAP has subscribed folders to contend
with along with synchronization across all of them.
Some users of Outlook, including MVPs, have noted that IMAP support in
Outlook is deficient; i.e., that Outlook's IMAP implementation is
somehow flaky. Yet they haven't elucidated on how IMAP is flaky in
Outlook. Although you mention getting a "smart phone" but never bother
to identify it so someone else that has it could provide help, you never
mentioned if it directly accesses your e-mail account or somehow
synchronizes with Outlook's message store. Did you install software for
the smart phone that included an add-in for Outlook? Or does the phone
just connect directly to Gmail? Are you having the phone sync to your
Gmail at the same time that Outlook is running and might also try to
sync with Gmail? Making multiple connections to the same account but
from different IP addresses can result in problems establishing a mail
session.
Here is something else I found as to why IMAP in Outlook might appear
flaky (although I see reports from users of other e-mail clients
reporting the same problems):
Event 4226: TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number
of concurrent TCP connection attempts (per second for half-open
connections)
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/...sys-connection-limit-patch-for-event-id-4226/
TCPIP.SYS was changed in Service Pack 2 for Windows XP and the changed
carried forward to later updates and into later versions of Windows.
This limits how many concurrent connection attempts (half-open
connections awaiting acknowledgement from the targeted host) per second
that are allowed by your Windows host. The maximum was reduced to
thwart worms from spreading (as fast) or infected hosts from using
trojan bots to participate in [D]DOS attacks against other hosts.
From some user reports, their e-mail client worked fine when they had a
few IMAP accounts defined, like just 2 of them, but they started getting
flaky when they increased the number of IMAP accounts, like 3 or more.
Outlook doesn't poll your e-mail accounts in series (i.e., one at a
time). It polls them all at once in parallel. That means you could
attempt to open more connections at a time than are allowed. There is
no configuration option in Outlook to force it to serially poll your
e-mail accounts (I've wanted this ever since Outlook 2000, and maybe
earlier). Awhile back, many e-mail providers would not permit multiple
connections to the same account from the same IP address, or they
limited how many connections were allowed per minute. This was to
thwart spam bots or deemed a security measure (like to prevent someone
spoofing your connection). They might not even allow multiple
connections from different IP addresses, like from your client on your
home computer and by your workstation at work. The restrictions of
multiple connects from different IP addresses went away first because
users increasingly were accessing their e-mails from different
locations.
In some e-mail clients, you can specify different poll intervals for
each e-mail account. That way, you could make longer the mail poll
intervals for your least-used or less-important accounts while also
reducing how many concurrent connections your client attempted to
establish. Outlook doesn't let you configure different poll intervals
for each account. You get just one global poll interval setting used
for all accounts of all types (POP, IMAP, HTTP/DAV, HTTP/Deltasync with
the add-on) and those polls aren't performed serially. So, blam,
Outlook makes a bunch of connects for all your accounts and polls them
all at the same time. As a consequence, users have sometimes reported
seeing a "Too many simultaneous [IMAP] connections" failure (from the
mail server), especially with Gmail which implements anti-spam and
anti-abuse quotas above its variant of IMAP implementation (see
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=97150). Multiple
users could be just you at multiple locations: one at home with Outlook
polling your accounts and you on your smart phone polling those same
accounts. Since you have 6 accounts at Gmail, you could be polling your
Gmail account on your smart phone at the same time that your Outlook is
polling your account resulting in twice the number of concurrent
connections (your 6 IMAP accounts would result in 12 concurrent connects
but 2 locations).
That's how it was done in the past. I can't speak on how Outlook 2007
does its mail polling. Yeah, Gmail is free but I've too often run into
anomalies with the POP and IMAP implementations or had problems that
traced back to their spam/abuse countermeasures. I'm now down to just
one Gmail account and I only poll it (using POP) to keep it alive.
You sure your smart phone cannot use POP to access your Gmail account?
Do you actually UNLOAD Outlook (exit it, not just minimize to a tray
icon) when you leave your desktop and then use your smart phone to
access your Gmail accounts via IMAP?
