New Gmail Feature: Fetch POP Mail

We’re a step further in having Gmail as our universal inbox. Here’s a new feature I think a lot of users have been asking for: the ability to retrieve external email via POP.

Gmail now lets you add up to five email accounts that you can retrieve into your Gmail inbox. The feature is not available to all accounts as of now, though. Do check your Gmail Settings under the Accounts tab. If you see Get mail from other accounts, then you’ve got the feature activated!

To add a new account, click the Add another mail account link. You will be asked to enter the email address. After that, you will be asked to input some details about the POP server.

Just input your POP username and password (username is usually the string that comes before @). If it’s a Gmail account, then Gmail will automatically choose the appropriate POP server. Otherwise, you can select “Other …” from the dropdown box. Make sure you input the correct POP port.

Now you have to choose whether to tick the following text boxes. Be sure you understand what you’re doing.

Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server. This is not checked by default. This means after Google retrieves your email from the POP box, it will delete all mail. This is useful if you have a limited POP inbox storage. However, if you prefer to retrieve your mail using different mail clients (like Outlook, Mozilla, OS X Mail, etc.) you might want to leave messages on the server so other clients can also retrieve them.

Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail. Leave this checked if your POP server allows SSL connections. Othewise, your email arrives through your network in clear text, and anyone with a packet sniffer can read your messages and even your POP password!

Label incoming messages. By default, Gmail will label your incoming messages from that POP inbox using the email address. This is great if you want to organize your messages according to which email inbox it came from.

The next feature, Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox) also helps in organizing your inbox view. Do remember that Gmail will retrieve ALL messages from the POP server, including spam ones. So this means having all those messages appearing into your inbox view would be a very bad idea if you get a lot of spam on that POP account.

Now if you want to be able to send mail from that POP email address, better check our article about Gmail being your universal email inbox, which basically tells you how to use the “Send from” feature to send using other email addresses.

This is a great feature, but I guess Google still has to work on better handling, especially with spam.