Grabbing POP3 Mail w/ Gmail

It’s become one of the crucial components of the way business gets done for me on the computer. I use it to organize information and to communicate with clients, both by e-mail and by instant messaging and chat. It’s Gmail.

Recently while at a client where I could not get POP3 email to send or receive with my settings behind their firewall I decided to try Gmail’s hand at accessing and sending e-mail from my other business POP3 accounts with the Gmail interface.

Things were easy to setup and manage from within the interface. That was expected, as for the most part getting things working with Google apps is usually not too major of an undertaking.

Image: Snagit from Gmail Accounts Setup

The challenge though is when I’m no longer onsite with that particular client. Gmail keeps checking those accounts for mail instead of just letting me handle it through Outlook 2007. Normally that wouldn’t be that big of a deal because I configured Gmail to leave copies of the mail on the server, so I’m not missing it from Outlook. I’m just having to manage the mail twice now to delete the copy in Gmail.

What I’d really like to be able to do is to “inactivate” those accounts in my Gmail interface without having to delete them completely. No such luck though. As long as the accounts are loaded in Gmail, they will continue to get checked for new email. For that reason I’ve just deleted them and will manage accessing those accounts via their independent webmail sites.

It sure would have been handy though to just keep using Gmail to consolidate all that information and communication. Not quite ready for that though as it relates to my needs from a business stand point.