Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Can I control how often Gmail polls POP3 accounts for incoming mail?

I use Gmail to handle my mail, but it's mostly imported by Gmail from an external POP3 account.

Normally this works fine, but I;ve had some instances where Gmail has gone almost 24 hours without even trying to contact the POP3 server.

Now, on Gmail 'desktop', I can push the "refresh" button, and it will do it, but when I access Gmail from my mobile, the mobile version of the site (on Android 1.5, not that it matters) doesn't seem to have a way of doing this refresh. AFAIK I can't even access the POP3 settings.

How can I get Gmail to poll in a guaranteed timely fashion?

From web app Roddy
  • You can't.

    Polling a external account works when you have a legacy account, that you don't want to abandon, but it's not very important.

    If you want to be sure the account is checked frequently, add it as a separated account in the Android device (you can leave the messages in the server if you want this mails consolidated in GMail)

  • Lifehacker.com just published a trick to increase the frequency of the checks.

    http://lifehacker.com/5580553/increase-the-frequency-gmail-checks-your-other-email-accounts-for-new-mail

    Its a bit of work to set it up, but essentially you need to ensure that your pop3 accounts frequently get new mail.

    Gmail bases its mail-fetching frequency on how often it finds messages in the account when it checks; if the account only gets email rarely, Gmail will check it once per hour. From what I've been able to tell, given a regular rate, Gmail's mail fetcher seems to stabilize at fetching twice as often as mail appears in the account.

    Senseful : You can also use Google Calendar for this: Make a dummy calendar and an event that is repeated every X minutes. Set up an email reminder for this event.
    From geoff
  • If you look under Google Labs, there's a feature called:

    Refresh POP accounts

    "Fetch messages from your POP accounts on demand by using the refresh link on top of the inbox."

    From Pierre Nel

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