When I started using the GMail service of Google Apps for my domain, I started experiencing this problem wherein if I already downloaded my emails to one POP Client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), I am not able to download those messages again to another POP client. This is the case even if I enable the options to “Leave Messages On Server” for my POP clients.
Well, while trying to find a solution, I temporarily enabled mail forwarding on my GMail account to an account I created in one of my mail servers. This way, I could just use my POP mail server to download my emails from different clients and then use GMail’s SMTP server for sending out emails. This is really not an ideal solution, but it’s better than having to enable POP for all mails each time I want to download my mails from another client and then delete duplicate mails.
It was during the weekend wherein I tried to check-out GMail’s Help pages (which I should have done in the first place) since I think that it would really be unlikely for GMail not to have a solution for multiple POP clients access. There it was, I found a solution here.
Basically, you just have to change your username from:
username@domain (e.g. [email protected])
to
recent:username@domain (e.g. [email protected])
This change would then allow you to download mails to any POP client, even if it was recently downloaded from other POP clients. Moreover, only mails that are in your Inbox for the last 30 days would be downloaded. This was really a relief for me since I won’t need another mail server just to support multiple POP clients.
See! I’m right to think that Google wouldn’t really ignore or forget about this kind of feature. 
[tags]GMail, POP, POP Mail, POP Clients, Email Forwarding, GMail Help, Mail Servers[/tags]
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