Pop goes the Gmail

June 15, 2004 3:00 PM

Ain't this grand? Pop Goes the Gmail is a program that sits between the http://gmail.com web server and your email client, converting messages from web format into POP3 format that a program such as Outlook Express or Thunderbird can understand.
posted by sunexplodes (43 comments total)

That seems completely backwards to me. I'd rather be able to read all my other pop mail in gmail. I find gmail's getting to be more useful than my apple Mail client, with a search that's instant and works faster than any client I've ever used.
posted by mathowie at 3:32 PM on June 15, 2004

[off-topic]
Yahoo! Mail Plus was upgraded overnight, and my account has gone from 25 MB to 2 GB. Overnight, I went from 71% full to 1% full. If nothing else, the gmail pressure is great (and don't get me wrong, I like my gmail account....) Reading gmail mail in a POP3 client is just icing.
[/off-topic]
posted by quarantine at 3:49 PM on June 15, 2004

I don't mean to rain on your parade, but maybe you should have waited until the general public could sign up for this gmail thing...
posted by ejoey at 3:57 PM on June 15, 2004

I don't mean to rain on your parade, but maybe you should have waited until the general public could sign up for this gmail thing...

Why?
posted by Space Coyote at 4:02 PM on June 15, 2004

Gmail is good at two things: archiving and searching.
Gmail sucks as a mail client it is missing a ton of cool features.

Now it would be nice to have a POP client that will auto forward Gamil onward so you can use any client to read the mail while using Gmail as a backend store and search.
posted by stbalbach at 4:09 PM on June 15, 2004

ejoey, don't get mad, get a Gmail account.
posted by signal at 4:11 PM on June 15, 2004

What "cool features" is Gmail missing?
posted by jacquilynne at 4:12 PM on June 15, 2004

PGTGM is cool. I've been using it at home, where I have thunderbird open all the time and set to check my email accounts every 10 mins to see if I have mail. With this thing too, I can now get notified if I have gmail and check it right from thunderbird.

At work, where I use outlook (and don't want my personal mail sitting on my work computer), I use gtray, which still checks for new mail at a specified interval, plus will log you into your gmai account with a single click when you do have new mail.
posted by Hackworth at 4:13 PM on June 15, 2004

Can someone explain to me how to obtain a GMail account. I don't see any sign up on Google's site, just future promises...
posted by ParisParamus at 4:19 PM on June 15, 2004

You need an invitation for Gmail, but invitations are getting easier to come by. I sent you one, Paris.
posted by maurice at 4:23 PM on June 15, 2004

Crap. I used the email address in your MeFi profile and it bounced. Send me another email address and I'll get you an invitation.

I don't know yet if I'll be using my Gmail much or not. It's a pretty cool interface, but changing addresses is a pain...
posted by maurice at 4:26 PM on June 15, 2004

The only thing keeping me from switching 100% over to gmail from mac.com is that I want to be able to access my mails from Mail.app. Yes, Matt, gmail beats Mail.app in some ways, but the combination will win me over without a doubt.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 4:36 PM on June 15, 2004

Sounds good in theory, but doesn't this program collect your gmail password? How can you be sure they are trustworthy?
posted by PrinceValium at 4:37 PM on June 15, 2004

I want IMAP access because my work is still on OS 9 with IE which isn't supported, and once the trial goes live they'll doubtless block gmail anyway, as they already have hotmail and yahoo. But mail2web will still work. Bring on the IMAP!
posted by bonaldi at 4:41 PM on June 15, 2004

hold a second. It may be off. Actually, I haven't used that in eons. I sent you an e-mail.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:42 PM on June 15, 2004

anyone have an extra invite to send my way? email or AIM in my profile. thanks much with extra sprinkles :)
posted by jacobsee at 4:45 PM on June 15, 2004

Well, that was a pointless double-post on my part. And here I was thinking I was innovative. Serves me right, reading MetaFilter reverse-chronologically. I'd offer a gmail invite for redemption, but I already traded them for whisky. ;-)
posted by quarantine at 4:46 PM on June 15, 2004

What "cool features" is Gmail missing?

Well, the ability to auto-forward mail for one. In fact anything you can do in procmail on unix which is basically unlimited in scope, gmail is missing. But takeing apples for apples look at Fastmail for example and all the features they have (youll have to sign up for a free account to see what they have). There are lots of mail clients and services available and many have lots of cool features, Gmail is very basic and really only has a big hard drive with quick search going for it.
posted by stbalbach at 4:50 PM on June 15, 2004

Actually, turns out I have two to give away. Addy in my profile.
posted by quarantine at 4:53 PM on June 15, 2004

I'm confused by this too: it'd be no big deal to set this up for Thunderbird and use it, but my interest in gmail is to see what a different attempt at "mail" might be. Sucking the text files off Google's server and reading them in a normal mail client seems like missing the point. (Which is not to disagree with those saying gmail is fairly bare-bones at this beat stage)
posted by yerfatma at 5:07 PM on June 15, 2004

"beta stage," not some Kerouackian development plateau.
posted by yerfatma at 5:07 PM on June 15, 2004

For those of you asking/offering, this is the place to be for getting/giving Gmail invitations.

I rather like gmail's bare-bones approach. It does almost exactly what I want it to do, and does it very well.
posted by Emanuel at 5:10 PM on June 15, 2004

As far as I'm concerned, I'd also rather be able to read email from other accounts in gmail rather than the other way around.

Beyond being speedy, I appreciate the way it offloads the "mental work" of organizing messages into conversations onto the computer. It seems fairly intuitive to me - why should I have to read my email on a message-by-message last-message-received-first basis when I could read all the relevant messages in one place, and keep all the others out of the way, not cluttering things up?
posted by lpqboy at 5:17 PM on June 15, 2004

To those lusting for Gmail accounts, I've got a bunch of invites. I'll invite anyone who emails me at 'hi at fury. com' before 6pm Pacific, or 20 invites total, whichever comes first. (And no secondsies, please. Only email if you don't have an account yet)
posted by kfury at 5:17 PM on June 15, 2004

thanks kfury, i should be all set now. looking forward to trying it out!
posted by jacobsee at 5:27 PM on June 15, 2004

Thanks, Maurice! I really haven't considered what I'll do with it, but I now have a GMail account.
posted by ParisParamus at 5:46 PM on June 15, 2004

Another thank you to kfury. Cheers!
posted by macrone at 5:51 PM on June 15, 2004

I want IMAP for my Yahoo account. I like Outlook, but I want to be able to still access e-mail on the road.
posted by benjh at 5:54 PM on June 15, 2004

Not being a member (and being lazy to boot), does gMail offer e-mail encryption? That would be a kick butt way at product differentiation and spur an interest in guaranteeing your virtual identity.
posted by infowar at 6:40 PM on June 15, 2004

I just don't understand why everyone has such a boner over Gmail.

But then again, maybe that's 'cause I don't have it, ain't never seen it, and don't know what I'm talking about....
posted by spilon at 7:31 PM on June 15, 2004

Todd kicks all our asses.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:40 PM on June 15, 2004

And to think I paid $21.69 on ebay last night. Oh well, at least I got the address "sanmigueldeallende", a small price to pay for such a uniquity.
posted by lometogo at 7:43 PM on June 15, 2004

This seems like a wonderful way to violate Gmail's Terms of Use. Specifically the section on Intellectual Property Rights:

You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service.
posted by Kwantsar at 8:02 PM on June 15, 2004

Speaking of POP3, it was the start of the present trend to increasingly centralized email. In other words, it moved people farther away (logically, not physically) from their mail servers. Used to be you would log in on the server to which your mail got delivered and read it there. Then POP. Then IMAP, which encouraged people to leave messages on the server, though their mail client was still elsewhere. Then webmail (hotmail was the first big one?) which people used for secondary communications and temporary throw-away accounts. It moved gigantic numbers of people on to bigger servers, farther away from their control. Now gmail, which aims to finalize the move over to web-mail, have everyone use it as their primary address in perpetuity.

My theory is that the main reason people want their email stored on some distant corporate datacentre, rather than their own machine, is that their home internet connection sucks. Hard to run a server when you're on dialup. My prediction is that centralized web-based mail will go away around the same time IPv6 is deployed. Real soon now, I'm sure.

Anyway, Google's mail service is only useful if you want web mail. It's braindead compared to a good [for some definitions of good] local mail client. I've no doubt that it's a bit better than the other big webmail systems, but that's not much cause for celebration: They all suck.

(disclaimer: I usually use 'grep' to search my vast mail archives, so my usage habits are probably not those of the typical user. I'm sure y'all have some good reason, completely beyond my comprehension, for being enthusiastic about gmail.)
posted by sfenders at 8:23 PM on June 15, 2004

the reason i like Pop Goes the Gmail is that it strips out the text ads.... so all I get is the message I want to read. Fun, no?
posted by sunexplodes at 8:25 PM on June 15, 2004

hmm, webmail seems to occasionally serve a purpose.

does anyone know of a similar thing that can grab all your old mail off a now unused Lycos or other account? I have some old accounts that i've stopped using but i still want the mail?
posted by mary8nne at 9:58 PM on June 15, 2004

Used to be you would log in on the server to which your mail got delivered and read it there.

Some of us still do.
posted by majcher at 11:16 PM on June 15, 2004

"the reason i like Pop Goes the Gmail is that it strips out the text ads.... so all I get is the message I want to read. Fun, no?"

Which is exactly why they'll do everything they possibly can to discourage or thwart such things.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 12:55 AM on June 16, 2004

Big shout to kfury for the Gmail. Cheers.
posted by DelusionsofGrandeur at 2:10 AM on June 16, 2004

Re: Reading other email in Gmail.

I do this, thanks to some fancy Rules mangement. If your email program supports "Redirect this message" as a rule action, you can wing it one of two ways:

- If your rules support "Stop processing rules" as an action, have rules that catch junk mail enable this action (or anything else you don't want to forward). Add a rule at the end of your rules list that says "If Subject contains (space), Redirect this message to my gmail account".

- If your rules support the "Is not Junk" parameter, have the same final rule, but change it to "If this message is not Junk, Redirect this message to my gmail account." Harder to weed out specific mail you don't want to forward this way, but it may not matter to most.

Voila! Instant web front-end to any email you want! Works pretty brilliantly for me.
posted by mkultra at 6:35 AM on June 16, 2004

Doesn't this program violate the g-mail terms of service?
posted by aaronshaf at 9:09 AM on June 16, 2004

Nm, I see Kwantsar's post.
posted by aaronshaf at 9:12 AM on June 16, 2004

For those of you who would like to make your Yahoo webmail account accessible in Outlook (or whatever POP client you use) check out YahooPOP, an opensource prog that sits in your tray and redirects Yahoo emails to your mail client of choice.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:22 AM on June 16, 2004