Gmail offers the ability to automatically check external accounts via a POP connection which can be very useful when one of your email accounts does not offer forwarding ability or you want to bypass the Gmail spam filter. The only drawback to this is the frequency of automatic checking is determined by the email volume of the respective account. Simply put, the more often a respective account receives mail, the more often Gmail will automatically check it.
Thankfully, there are a few things you can do:
- Enable the "Refresh POP accounts" add-on from Google Labs which enables the clicking of the Gmail Refresh button to go check the linked POP accounts.
- Use a service such as GSpeed which will send you emails on a regular interval which will trigger Gmail to check your accounts more frequently. Of course with this, you would need to have a filter to automatically delete these garbage messages and you would also have the concern about giving your email out to such a service.
Most likely the first option will fit your needs if this is problem for you. However, if all else fails you could always just wait for Gmail to run its course naturally.
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Refreshing your POP account was always available using Settings. But I like the Lab button better, it’s easier. And I’m not too sure that Gspeed does much. My three POP accounts all get retrieved every 30 minutes (again, by looking at what it says in the settings), and one’s hardly used, and the other is much more used.
My only problem with this is if you use a mail client that connects to gMail as well as the POP account, you can get duplicate emails. A bit of a pain…