New Email Setup
It took me a while to bite the bullet but I finally Google-ized my email.
My hosting provider only supports POP3. With no IMAP in sight, I was stuck with out of sync email between my PC and phone. I set up the phone to download copies of my email but to leave the originals on the server.
This creates two problems. The first is, after downloading email to my phone, I still have to download it to my PC and delete anything I don’t want. We all get enough email these days, and having to read some pieces twice is just nuts.
Second, if I leave my PC email client logged in, it would pull down messages from the server and my phone would not be able to get them. I experienced this a couple of weeks ago when my wife was trying to email me a Panera order while I was out. My PC kept consuming the email.
Of course, I could just have both my PC and phone download copies of the emails but then, even more deleting is involved.
So I switched over to Gmail as a front for my personal account. Gmail fetches messages from my POP3 account every 5 minutes. Both my PC and phone now point to Gmail’s IMAP interface and have truly synchronized IMAP access to my email.
It was pretty easy to set up and works quite well.
I suspect Google must know how useful this feature is. And it is a brilliant “take over the world” move on their part, as they get to serve your email, data-mine it for marketing info, and show you a few ads when you log on via the web interface.