Hi all,
I have just recently learned the difference between imap and pop, and could use some help trying to get my two Leopard machines to sync their Mail via Gmail imap.
I looked at my gmail settings and found I already had "Enable imap" selected. Then I looked at my two gmail accounts in "Mail" and they were both pop accounts. So in "Mail" I switched the servers they use to the imap servers. I noticed that they still say "Account type: pop" but I figure that is only a label and not a functional title (and couldn't see any way to change that to imap). So then I created the same two accounts on the newly acquired laptop (also runs Leopard) and made sure they were imap accounts right from the start.
This is where I got confused. When I pressed "Get Mail" on the second machine, it said it was downloading over 5,000 emails. I don't have anywhere near that many in my first computer's "Mail". I was under the impression that imap syncs the two "Mail" applications, so I didn't know what was going on. Was it downloading every email of mine on the gmail server? Is there any way I can avoid this? I have never deleted any of my emails off their server, so I have waaaay too many to put on my computer. I just want the two computers sync'd. Another weird thing is that in the second email account, emails were appearing on the second machine as unread, even though they were all read on the first machine. Aren't they supposed to show up as read?
I'm wondering... is it wrong for me to have changed a pop account from an imap? Should I have created new imap accounts in "Mail", and then deleted the old pop ones? And if I had done that, would all my mailboxes and emails get deleted or would they magically appear in the new accounts? I'm really worried about losing important emails, especially since one strange thing that happened during this process was all my emails in one account from Feb 11 to Feb 19 disappeared off the gmail server! If there is a fail safe way to do this, please give me instructions that a 5 year old could follow so I won't screw it up. Much thanks ahead of time to any of the very knowledgeable people on here who care to chime in!
I have just recently learned the difference between imap and pop, and could use some help trying to get my two Leopard machines to sync their Mail via Gmail imap.
I looked at my gmail settings and found I already had "Enable imap" selected. Then I looked at my two gmail accounts in "Mail" and they were both pop accounts. So in "Mail" I switched the servers they use to the imap servers. I noticed that they still say "Account type: pop" but I figure that is only a label and not a functional title (and couldn't see any way to change that to imap). So then I created the same two accounts on the newly acquired laptop (also runs Leopard) and made sure they were imap accounts right from the start.
This is where I got confused. When I pressed "Get Mail" on the second machine, it said it was downloading over 5,000 emails. I don't have anywhere near that many in my first computer's "Mail". I was under the impression that imap syncs the two "Mail" applications, so I didn't know what was going on. Was it downloading every email of mine on the gmail server? Is there any way I can avoid this? I have never deleted any of my emails off their server, so I have waaaay too many to put on my computer. I just want the two computers sync'd. Another weird thing is that in the second email account, emails were appearing on the second machine as unread, even though they were all read on the first machine. Aren't they supposed to show up as read?
I'm wondering... is it wrong for me to have changed a pop account from an imap? Should I have created new imap accounts in "Mail", and then deleted the old pop ones? And if I had done that, would all my mailboxes and emails get deleted or would they magically appear in the new accounts? I'm really worried about losing important emails, especially since one strange thing that happened during this process was all my emails in one account from Feb 11 to Feb 19 disappeared off the gmail server! If there is a fail safe way to do this, please give me instructions that a 5 year old could follow so I won't screw it up. Much thanks ahead of time to any of the very knowledgeable people on here who care to chime in!