Get Gmail Messages Delivered on Multiple Computers via POP

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.

Gmail on Two Computers

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.

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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