Why won't mail.app get my most recent messages?

Are the messages available for download server side?

@Spargett: Not sure I understand your response; I can see the new messages that I want downloaded on gmail (when I turned off auto-archiving), and my iPhone downloads all new messages correctly.

Maybe the iPhone downloads them, so Mail.app thinks they’ve already been downloaded and doesn’t worry about them. Both are using POP?

@bob: that’s correct. both use pop.

I guess you want to make sure “recent mode” is turned on in your iphone > settings > mail > gmail account > advanced… that way the phone will download all recent messages, even if they’ve been downloaded by another POP and/or answered in the web app. That should also keep the phone from downloading anything older than 30 days.

hang on, I got very confused…

Please ignore my other post—but I still think Mail.app thinks the messages have already been downloaded (since they have been, by the iPhone).

Switching to IMAP is a solution. Apple suggests that using IMAP is the easiest way to keep your email synced on two different computers, which is basically what you’re doing.

The other option would be to make sure iPhone and Mail.app are keeping copies of the messages on the server.

I have several email addresses that I use Mail.app for, and when I compose a new email, I have the drop-down menu to select the preferred address for that particular document. The iPhone sends from whatever account you are in when you choose to compose or reply or forward; but if generating an email from within Safari, it defaults to the account that you set as your primary.

Gmail is NOT one of the accounts in my Mail.app—I use the GMail Notifier in my menu bar to let me know when there’s something new, and Yahoo Messenger has a notifier for new mail (since I won’t pay for POP/IMAP access to Yahoo).

I wish GMail would acknowledge when I’ve seen a message, either via Safari on my iMac or from my iPhone’s Mail service. It doesn’t matter which device I use to look at the message first, the other still considers it unread. This annoys me, as do a few other things about sorting GMail that I’m still trying to figure out… :(

@bob: I’m pretty sure gmail doesn’t have an IMAP implementation, they just have POP3 forwarding, so IMPA (while it would be ideal) isn’t an option. (Sorry I wasn’t clear that this was syncing with gmail in my original post).

How would mail.app know about my iPhone settings? Through syncs or something? I got the impression that POP servers don’t keep track of downloads, unless Gmail is doing something funny on their side.

@hearkat: I use notifier for my gmail account, I was just trying to route things through mail.app so I can have nifty integration with iGTD.

Well, the fact that Gmail doesn’t support IMAP is a pretty good reason not to use it. :) I don’t know why I thought they did.

Mail.app could get screwed up if the iPhone were removing messages from the server, or if Gmail’s POP preferences were set to auto-archive messages after they’d been downloaded (which is an option in Gmail).

Word. Gmail now has IMAP. Check your settings.

The link suggests that it’s being rolled out on an account-by-account basis, but I already have it on mine. You might have to log out and then back in to see it.

And let’s pretend my other answers were prescient rather than merely inaccurate.

I have the exact same problem (but I use Yahoo! business mail instead of gmail), and I know for a fact none of the answers provided here is the solution. Here’s the scoop:

- Mail won’t download messages through POP, even though they are all in the server.
– iPhone does so neatly and flawlessly.
– Mail USED TO be able to do this just as neatly and flawlessly.

Here’s an extra twist: I’ve installed Microsoft Entourage, but it also won’t download.

I wonder whether it has to do with the size of the server’s mailbox (large in my case).