Help: Trying to get Apple Mail to be my client program with GMail

Question

I've used Apple Mail (OS 10.4.10) as my email program for Comcast Mail. I am dropping our Comcast service soon and picking up GMail as my primary email program. I want to use the Apple Mail program to pick up my mail from the GMail server. According to GMail I can do this. I followed all of the directions on the GMail site but still can't get test emails to show up in my Apple Mail inbox. I've sent test emails several times with no luck. All they do is show up in my GMail inbox and not in the Apple Mail inbox.

Answer 1

Assuming you’ve configured the account correctly both in Mail and on the web, from which account have you sent the test messages that Mail doesn’t download?
Gmail POP access doesn’t work like a normal POP mail server would. Here are some of its idiosyncrasies (#6 could be what you’re observing):
1. Messages downloaded by any conventional POP mail client are marked as downloaded at the server (but not as read on the web), and no longer available to either the same or any other POP mail client.
2. To make already downloaded messages available for POP access again, you must go to Gmail’s Settings > Forwarding and POP page, select Enable POP for all mail, and click Save Changes, which causes everything (and I mean everything) still on the server to be downloaded again.
3. The Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Advanced > Remove copy from server settings have absolutely no effect on the messages stored on Gmail’s server. Gmail ignores any requests to delete messages from the server made by a POP client. What happens to the messages on the server after a POP client has downloaded them is determined by Gmail’s Settings > Forwarding and POP > When messages are accessed with POP setting alone. In the case of Gmail (and only in that case), I recommend turning OFF Remove copy from server in Mail, so that Mail doesn’t even try to remove any messages from the server, regardless of whether you do actually want already downloaded messages to be removed from the server after some time or not.
4. Messages sent using the web interface will be downloaded by your POP mail client as if they were received messages. Although this may seem weird, it's good because it allows archiving all messages locally in Mail, regardless of how they were sent — as long as you don't access the same Gmail account with more than one POP mail client, that is. You can set up a rule in Mail to automatically route those messages to the appropriate Sent mailbox (or to any other mailbox for that matter) if that's what you want.
5. Messages sent using a POP/SMTP mail client such as Mail are also treated as if they were incoming messages for POP purposes, just as in #4. What prevents them from being downloaded is that Gmail marks them as already downloaded immediately. Since they’re on the server nonetheless, already sent messages would be downloaded together with all the other messages on the server if proceeding as described in #2.
6. A particular case of #5 are messages sent to yourself. Instead of putting a copy of the sent message in the server’s Inbox and making it available for download, both the sent and the “received” message on the server are actually one and the same, and hence, cannot be downloaded via POP for the reason explained in #5.
7. Gmail allows POP accounts to be set up in a special way that avoids some of these issues while introducing others. If you only need POP access to the last 30 days of mail, you can configure Mail in “recent mode”, as described in How should I use POP on mobile or multiple devices?, i.e. by typing “recent:” (including the colon but not the quotes) at the beginning of the User Name field (not in the Email Address field) in Mail > Preferences > Accounts > Account Information. Configuring the account this way would allow Mail to download messages marked by Gmail as already downloaded (and download messages sent to yourself in particular), but it would also cause all sent messages (not just messages sent to yourself or through webmail) to be downloaded as if they were received messages.