How Good is Gmail’s Mail Fetcher?
3:12 pm April 6th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
After a few months of having Mail Fetcher available to me, I finally got around to setting it up. The goal was to add consolidate two Gmail accounts so I could control one that I rarely use from my primary account.
Setting up a Gmail-to-Gmail fetcher is extremely easy and takes just a few seconds once you have made sure that the secondary account allows for POP access. Setting up Mail Fetcher with another email service probably won’t be quite as easy, but so long as you know some basic information it should not take very long at all. For me it took a minute or two to set up but the system was not functioning 100% properly for an hour or two (message retrieval was laggy and it was saying that is fetched messages but they did not appear).
Not that Mail Fetcher is set up and working properly I have two problems with it. The first is that Gmail only checks the second mailbox every 60 minutes. My account checks at the 17th minute of each hour and there is not setting to make it check more frequently. There is a “check mail now” command but to get to this you need to go in settings and then to the accounts tab, which is inconvenient. More of a problem for me is that when sending out or replying to email you can choose to send it from either address, but Gmail always includes a section in the email header for the sender. This means that when replying an email sent to my secondary account the header the recepient sees will have the correct “From:” address, but the “Sender:” is my primary address! This is not okay if you are using the account for work or trying to completely differentiate between two accounts, which for many people is the entire point of Mail Fetcher.
Google covers this on their help page:
Note: your Gmail address will still be included in your email headers in the sender field, to help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email clients do not display the sender field, though some versions of Microsoft Outlook may display “From customaddress@domain.com on behalf of yourusername@gmail.com.”
The other option, especially if you don’t want to wait, is to set up a forwarder on the second account which means you should get it sooner, but than the Sender/From issue still exists. Plus you will have to still set up “Send mail as:” in your account tab which is a similar process to setting up Fetcher.
All told, Mail Fetcher is a great option, but it has its problems. The Google’s Discussion Group on POP and forwarding brings up some issues about people have trouble getting the Fetcher to stop fetching when they are done with it and a lot of people complaing about the From/Sender issue. Many point out that Yahoo Mail Plus does not have this problem and this not only is this a problem with Gmail but that it is something that is easy to fix (or at least make a setting to change). It is something that will prevent me from using Gmail with my work email addresses as the whole point of having separate accounts and a fetcher is to be able to keep them apart while consolidating storage and access.
