Do you access Gmail messages on two or more computers via POP clients like Outlook or Thunderbird. The problem (or advantage) with POP access is that once an email message gets downloaded onto one computer, it is skipped by other email clients.
To explain that further - let’s say you have configured both your personal laptop and work computer to download emails from your Gmail account via POP access. Now if the emails are downloaded to the laptop first, they wont be available on your work computer (and vice-versa).
While this is a time-saving feature, your emails are split across different computers. To trick your POP client into downloading Gmail emails that are already fetched by other clients, just use the recent mode in Gmail.
Open your Outlook (or other POP client) and add the word “recent:” to your gmail username. That means if your gmail address is “john@gmail.com” replace that with “recent:john@gmail.com”
This trick will also work on custom domains if you are using Google Apps with Gmail.
Other lesser known Gmail tricks - Mute Email, Dot Blindness.
For details, refer to Google Apps Support and Gmail Support.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/check-gmail-email-on-multiple-computers/1968/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Surely IMAP (which Gmail now supports) is a better solution to this problem?
Written by Arf on 12.21.07
Nice trick…also useful for dual-boot installations of different OSes. But surely, IMAP is better.
Written by anonymous on 12.23.07
IMAP is one of the best way to accomplish this but whatever, still a cool, geeky trick though.
Written by Syahid A. on 12.25.07
Very nice and handy tip, thanx
Written by Sanjay on 12.27.07
nice trick, got it working between mail, entourage, eudora, and outlook!
Written by msbob on 04.09.08
nice tweak. but I’m facing another problem which is all my previous mails started flushing into my POP (outlook) mail. Almost 450mb of them. Wat should I do now?
Cheers.
Written by eric on 04.16.08
Thanks for the great tweak. It’s just what I needed.
imap doesn’t work in all situations, and it is dangerous.
if I accidentally delete old mails, they’re gone forever.
Using this system, I can work on both computers and keep a safe archive on the by apps account.
Written by ariel on 11.10.08
Thanks for this! A local University made the switch to Gmail recently and since then there have been problems with our customers trying to receive email on their Blackberry devices. I assume it was related to this problem which I have had on both of my computers and my Blackberry.
I made the change in Thunderbird and on the Blackberry site and now I get the messages on both, as I do with all my other Email addresses.
Written by ScaryFast on 01.21.09
Is it necessary to change the “User Name” in addition to the “E-mail Address” entry? (ex. Would the user name change from John.Smith to recent:John.Smith?)
Written by kyle on 01.27.09
For some reason this doesn’t seem to be working with my Outlook 2002 and the current operator. Any ideas what might be wrong? For now I had to resort to the “duct tape fix” (i.e. create another gmail account, forward mail to the new account while keeping a copy in the inbox, and remove the first gmail account from the send/receive group on one computer). I now get all my mail on both computers, and can still send mail via my first gmail account. Pretty? No, but it does work…just like duct tape.
Written by kyle on 01.28.09
EXCELLENT - Exactly the solution, that I was looking for. It made me crazy, that the emails only downloaded on the computer, that checked GMails “first” - one time it was the iMac, another time the Macbook. Mails were split between computers (exactly as described above. I always had to download all emails from GMail again and again and again. And then always delete the ones, that were double. A nightmare. Thanks to Agarwal - it’s over. By the way, I found some other GMail tricks, that might come in handy: http://scottjohnsonflorida.blogspot.com/2008/03/gmail-tracking-tricks.html link
Best wishes - and thanks again!
Written by Adriana on 01.30.09
Thanks! I tried this and it was just what I was looking for but now all my outgoing messages are flooding into my inbox and it continues to happen every time I send a message. Is there any way I can receive just the incoming messages?
Written by Victoria on 02.02.09
To Victoria: The way, I solved this, was, that I am using a DIFFERENT SMTP-server when sending messages. You might also be able to filter Sent messages by selecting “Skip Inbox” in your GMail account. If you want to have/keep those messages in your GMail account, you would also select “Archive it” and/or apply a label. Let me know, if this helped.
Written by Adriana on 02.04.09
Beautiful - thanks so much! For all those saying “Use Imap instead” - The combination of Outlook 2007, Gmail and IMAP is not a good one once you have significant volumes of mail. It gets incredibly laggy and unresponsive to the point of being unusable.
Thanks again, great tip!
Written by sambo on 03.18.09