Bath Spa Email 2011 ... Gmail Mailfetcher

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Gmail: 'Mailfetcher' collects your mail from other email accounts you own

When you start using a different email account, your previous account usually contains email you'd like to keep - and may continue to receive email you'd like to see. If you've used a "@bathspa.org" account, set your Gmail account to fetch email from your that. If it's an email account from another provider this should work from any account that supports the pop mail protocol that this needs.

Gmail 'Mailfetcher': setting this up

You set up 'Mailfetcher' from within your gmail account.

Log in to your Bath Spa Gmail account and select its settings - the 'Cog' at top right.

Select that cog and then Gmail's 'Mail settings'. You'll see a number of tabs, select 'Accounts' and then the section 'Get mail from other accounts'.

• Select 'Add a mail account you own' and provide its email address.
• Google inspects the address, and attempts to derive the settings needed to retrieve email from it. e.g for a "@bathspa.org" account, it provides "pop3.live.com" as the name for the mail server. Check that this has worked:

Students with @bathspa.org accounts: 'Mailfetcher' settings

(You'll need to provide your password for your "@bathspa.org" account. Also, while 'Mailfetcher' needs pop enabled on the account from which you'll fetch mail, your "@bathspa.org" account has pop enabled by default.)

Postgraduates with @live.bathspa.ac.uk accounts: 'Mailfetcher' settings

If you have a postgrad account with an email address of the sort @live.bathspa.ac.uk, 'Mailfetcher' will again need you to provide your username and password for that account - and these server settings.

Fetchmail: other useful settings

Look at the screenshot above and you'll see four checkboxes for additional settings, here's guidance:

Leave a copy of the retrieved messages on the server

If you tick this, when your mail is fetched by your Gmail account, a copy will be left on your "@bathspa.org" account. If you tend to delete things by accident, tick it - your other email account will then retain copies of messages that are forwarded to your Bath Spa gmail account.

Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail

This will be ticked, leave it ticked so that your email is secure.

Label incoming messages

It's good to tick this: when email is fetched to your Google account it's then labelled automatically as "firstname.surname@hotmail.co.uk", and you can identify it as having come from your @bathspa.org account. By default, this labels the email with your email address for the other account.

Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox)

Tick this and messages fetched from your "@bathspa.org" account will not show up in your inbox - you'll find them with the label you've set in the previous option though ...

Once this is set up, mail from other accounts will be fetched by your Gmail account and you can check everything in one place.

Use 'Fetchmail' to copy email from your Bath Spa account

You may need to take a copy of your email, e.g. when you move to a new employer.

One option is to use 'Mailfetcher' to download copies of your email to a second Gmail account.

Having enabled POP3 on the first account, go to the receiving account and use 'Mailfetcher' settings there to copy your email to the second account.

A second option: use an email client to download copies to your own machine.

Thunderbird is an email client that is open source and free at point of use. Once installed, and once you've set your Bath Spa Gmail account to allow POP3, moved anything you'd like to download into your 'Inbox' and marked it as unread, create a mail account in Thunderbird with a POP3 connection to the Gmail account from which you'll be downloading your messages and Thunderbird will pull those messages from Gmail's mail servers. If you need it to leave a copy on Gmail, look for the Thunderbird account setting 'Leave a copy on the server' and tick that before fetching mail ...

'Mailfetcher', POP3, and 'Try again later' messages ...

If you find that this doesn't work and you get a 'Try again later' message, do not wait and try later, instead, on the receiving account, when setting up mail fetcher, uncheck 'Leave a copy of the message on the server.' That's counter intuitive - the 'leave messages on server' is actually controlled by a similar mailfetcher setting on the account from which you'll be downloading the messages - and at the time of writing the two settings, if they conflict, break 'Mailfetcher' completely.

'Fetchmail' not working at all?

If you've another account that does not 'Do' 'pop' email, an alternative is to set up a forwarding rule within that account - you'll need to seek out the precise way it works for any particular account, but most have a mechanism that allows you to forward mail to another account.

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Mark Annand • Site updated April 12th 2013 • Site Counter:

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