How do you use POP access with Gmail?

November 10, 2004 2:36 PM

I've read on several sites that Gmail is offering POP access. I can find nothing on their site about it. Can someone tell me how this works?
posted by cedar to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

FAQ here with all the details. You have to enable it at your settings on the web site first. Seems they may take a while to get around to everyone but mine is already working very nicely.
posted by Zootoon at 2:45 PM on November 10, 2004

Also, this from the help inside gmail:

Over the next several weeks, we are introducing POP access to all of our users. To make sure the feature is fully stable, we're giving users access to POP in phases. Once POP access is available to you, a 'New Features!' link appears at the top of your account, along with a 'Forwarding and POP' tab on your 'Settings' page.

posted by spartacusroosevelt at 3:04 PM on November 10, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks, Zootoon.

I don't yet have the setting available to me but the FAQ is bookmarked and I'm hoping to see it soon. This could be the beginning of my final transition to Gmail, I hate webmail and am mostly using Opera (Gmail doesn't work with Opera, how lame is that?) so have been putting it off.
posted by cedar at 3:17 PM on November 10, 2004

I think it might be a "chosen few" sort of thing. I got an email direct from Google this morning, but I was on some of the earliest betas and maybe that's why.
posted by mathowie at 4:26 PM on November 10, 2004

Dunno about that. I've had a gmail account for 4 days now, and I got the POP option this morning. They did say that they were rolling out to some customers at a time over the next couple of weeks. I alse got 6 invites yesterday. Who knows what they're thinking?

I actually got the gmail account to offload a lot of the programming mailing lists and other impersonal mail from my email client, so I'm not likely to take advantage of this.

The other thing I'm curious about is how they're planning to make money off the POP users, since presumably they're not going to be showing the ads to those people.
posted by boaz at 5:08 PM on November 10, 2004

They might make you pay for it later.
posted by justgary at 5:36 PM on November 10, 2004