Gmail – Control How Often Gmail Polls POP3 Accounts

gmailmobilepop3

I use Gmail to handle my mail, but it's mostly imported by Gmail from an external POP3 account.

Normally this works fine, but I;ve had some instances where Gmail has gone almost 24 hours without even trying to contact the POP3 server.

Now, on Gmail 'desktop', I can push the "refresh" button, and it will do it, but when I access Gmail from my mobile, the mobile version of the site (on Android 1.5, not that it matters) doesn't seem to have a way of doing this refresh. AFAIK I can't even access the POP3 settings.

How can I get Gmail to poll in a guaranteed timely fashion?

Best Answer

Lifehacker.com just published a trick to increase the frequency of the checks in Gmail.

It's a bit of work to set it up, but essentially you need to ensure that your POP3 accounts frequently get new mail.

Gmail bases its mail-fetching frequency on how often it finds messages in the account when it checks; if the account only gets email rarely, Gmail will check it once per hour. From what I've been able to tell, given a regular rate, Gmail's mail fetcher seems to stabilize at fetching twice as often as mail appears in the account.

Related Topic