2514 Gmail - friend or foe?

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Some people are like a Slinky, not really good for anything,
but you still can't help but smile
when you shove them down the stairs.

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A little while ago I decided to try Gmail. Right now my email addresses are on AOL and Yahoo. I dislike Yahoo, and don't have a lot of confidence that AOL will be around forever, and their programmers seem to be bottom of the barrel. I set up an account, and then used a Gmail facility that allows you to transfer the contents of the AOL inbox to Gmail - leaving a copy of the email in the AOL inbox. Sounded good to me. You can also ask it to transfer AOL email to Gmail as it arrives, again leaving a copy with AOL.

It sorta worked. All the AOL email (I had about 550 items) appeared in the Gmail inbox. However, when I went to AOL, about 20 of the oldest items had disappeared. They weren't in "Deleted" or in "Old Mail". They were simply gone.

The next day when I went to AOL mail, I was shocked to discover I had only four items in the inbox, mail that had arrived overnight. The other 500+ were in the "Old Mail", which is bad, because they are automatically deleted after one day. If I'd been away for the weekend, they'd have disappeared. So I pressed the "Keep as New" button 500+ times to put them back in the inbox.

Once Gmail "grabs" a copy, AOL apparently considers it read, not new, and trashes it 24 hours after it becomes "old". Telling AOL to "Keep as New" should fix it, right?

Next morning, same thing.

I don't understand. Why is AOL ignoring the "Keep as New", on mail Gmail hasn't grabbed again?

So I went to Gmail and changed the option so it would no longer "grab" new mail from AOL. At all. In theory, Gmail doesn't even know about the AOL address any more.

Problem solved, right?

No. AOL is still trashing email that Gmail originally copied, over and over, every day.

Worse, Gmail is still grabbing copies of email from AOL, but not every piece. It seems to be random, and it's NOT leaving a copy with AOL. I wandered over to Gmail this morning, and found several bits of email sent to the AOL address over the past few days that never showed up on AOL.

[Sorry, Sister. I wasn't ignoring your travel confirmation. AOL was. I'm glad you're going, I'm sure you'll both feel a lot better.]
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