Sunday, September 30, 2007

Making the gmail POP migration - tricky settings

My local ISP is visi.com, I've used their email services for many years. They changed management recently however, and I don't care for their new procedures. I've decided to move away from their services; that meant my pop services needed to migrate to gmail.

Gmail is already my primary email workplace, I use Eudora primarily for maintaining a local archive. So this migration was really more sensible than my old forward from Gmail setup.

It took me a while to get Eudora working with gmail -- I kept getting timeout errors. I had no trouble with OS X Mail.app, so I figured I was missing something in my configuration. Turns out I had two errors:
  1. I had to require eudora use its "alternate" port (be nice if Eudora simply let me set the port address) for both send and receive.
  2. Leave mail on server must be unchecked.
I like how it works. In particular:
  1. It doesn't matter whether I archive email or leave it in the inbox - it comes across when I access the pop service.
  2. If I send mail from eudora it's saved as sent email both in eudora and gmail.
If I send email from Gmail, it's not picked up by Eudora. So when I want to save a copy in my home archive I send it to my old visi account, there a redirect sends back to my Gmail inbox. The next time I do a pop check the message is saved to my home archive.

Overall it's a nice improvement. I mostly use Gmail and delete whatever I don't care to keep, so this will reduce the amount I store in my home archive.

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