Setting up Outlook on multiple computers
As anyone who reads this probably gathered, Lizardwebs has just moved into a new office in Clayton, NC. 115 East 1st St Clayton, NC to be exact. And this has required that I almost have duplicate setups for my home office and my business office for a number of things. This kind of stuff never seems to be *quite* as easy as one might first imagine.
The biggest stumbling block (behind needing duplicate development servers) has been email. After a week of being in the office regularly, today was the day that I resolved that issue finally. I installed Outlook 2007 after I setup my new workstation, and then imported my PST file and contacts and all that good stuff. I setup the “Leave mail on server” so I could check emails from both home office and business office… However… there was a small issue…
I would receive a few emails, but not others in my office Outlook 2007. As a test, I turned off Outlook 2007 at the home office. Then everything came through nicely throughout the day at my business office workstation. But then when I got home, nothing. That’s a bit of a spot. I then would have two completely different email contents depending on where I was.
I checked my Google email domain setup and saw no particular issues – and all the emails where there in the web browser interface. Puzzling. But larger problems ensued – like making money and keeping customers happy – so I moved on for a few days. All the emails came through to my droid without an issue and always had and I could get there via web interface – which has proved less than handy with the volume of email I get.
This morning I decided that I needed to resolve this email not downloading issue finally while waiting for my friendly neighborhood Time Warner Cable Business Class RoadRunner installer guy to show up. We’re currently using Clear Wireless, but that’s proved to be less reliable than I had hoped… But I digress…
Digging around, I found an answer not too far down in the search results for “Outlook not downloading messages” – “Recent Mode” – recent mode? What the heck? Apparently with a GMail domain or a general Gmail account, your viewed messages get marked as having been downloaded – probably to cut down on general traffic across the network trying to redownload stuff that would be redundant. I’ve never seen this with any other domain though or any other mail server – just simply do the “Leave mail on server” thing and that’s normally all that’s required.
Here’s the skinny on enabling “Recent Mode” with any Gmail account or Gmail-based domain – directly from Google.
What is ‘recent mode?’
If you’re accessing Gmail on multiple clients through POP, Gmail’s ‘recent mode’ makes sure that all messages are made available to each client, rather than only to the first client to access new mail.
Recent mode fetches the last 30 days of mail, regardless of whether it’s been sent to another POP client already.
Setting up ‘recent mode’
In your POP client settings, replace ‘username@gmail.com’ in the ‘Username’ or ‘Email’ field with ‘recent:username@gmail.com’
Once you enable recent mode, please be sure to configure your POP client to leave messages on the server according to the instructions below:
- Outlook or Outlook Express: on the Advanced tab, check the box next to ‘Leave a copy of messages on the server.’
- Apple Mail: on the Advanced tab, remove the check next to ‘Remove copy from server after retrieving a message.’
- Thunderbird: on the Server Settings tab, check the box next to ‘Leave messages on server.’
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