Monday, April 18, 2005

SnapperMail and GMail

I have recently bought SnapperMail because it has by far and away the best IMAP handling (which I need for work) and is one of teh few Palm email clients which can send via the GMail SMTP server.

However, there is a really irritationg feature of its POP access to GMail: if I download an email to the Palm via POP, I cannot then also download it via POP with Eudora on my Mac. This means that I cannot use Eudora to make an offline archive of my email. this is certainly a Snapper problem, because it never happened when I was using the Treo Mail app (which is Handmail).

Up until I started using Snapper, it had seemed that the way GMail POP access worked was that if, but only if, the POP client tried to delete the message from the server, it would not be available to download by another client. So all I needed to do was set my email clients to 'Leave message on server for N days'. But that does not work with Snapper.

For teh record, there is one other oddity which is an artefact of GMail: if you reply to a message, then your reply becomes part of the conversation in your GMail Inbox and is thus dowloaded when you access the Inbox via POP, but if you send a new message, it is not downloaded with POP because it is not in your Inbox.